Here is the next topic I’d like to write about.

Take Shakespeare quiz.

I’ve moved my blog over to http://eabbey.blogspot.com to take advantage of a couple features.  For those who are visiting, please visit me over there.

As a newbie to this area, I was fortunate to attend this conference… I feel like I received quite a bit of info and networked with the right people.  Unfortunately, my computer fried the second day, so I haven’t been able to blog until now.

Here are some initial thoughts:

1. Most impressed with… Rich Jolles’ session on Aligning Professional Development, Mentoring, and Evaluation for Quality Teaching.  Here is someone who knows what he is doing.  He is coordinating the K-12 elearning at Montgomery County Public Schools in Rockville, Maryland.  And, while he didn’t spend too much time boasting about his institution, you can tell things are working well there.  The mentoring program that he has in place is very well laid out, including a week-by-week calendar for new online teachers and their mentors to help with the process.  We don’t even have that for regular classroom teachers, let alone online teachers.

He also identifies specifically how online teaching, and therefore professional development for online teachers, is different.  And, there is quite a difference!  The mentoring piece is directly tied to the program/teacher evaluation.  In other words, what you learn is what you will be accountable for.  I will be mimicing him.

2. Still thinking about… George Siemens’ keynote.  Okay, I’m vaguely familiar with the theory of connectivity, and Siemens’ presentation helps crystallize some of what he has written about for me.  In general, I can espouse the notion of teacher as curator or concierge to some degree, although I’ve always preferred the notion of teacher as orchestra conductor.  It is some of his logical deductions that I am having problem with.  Give me some time… I’ll have a full Siemens’ discussion.

3. Is that all we get? Curtis Bonk’s keynote was enticing, but then anticlimactic for me.  I’m looking forward to his new book and his concept of “the world is open”, spinning Friedman’s concept for education.  But I didn’t get a good look at what this will mean, other than there’s a lot of stuff out there (he’s categorized this openness in 10 categories, each with a bevy of web 2.0 tools that are revolutionary).  I’ve got the “internet is full of revolutionary tools” thing down already.  I need the way that makes the traditional way unacceptable or impossible.  Friedman’s work implies that, since the world is flattening, education will have no choice but to change to meet its needs, probably kicking and screaming.  I was looking for Bonk to show how that change will become “mandatory”.  For in my mind, I can easily foresee education being the last arena to adopt the new world.  I didn’t get that.  Perhaps the book will connect the dots (he only had 50 minutes, which is limiting for a tangential speaker like Bonk).

4. The buzz is… Second Life.  Everywhere I went, it was Second Life this and Second Life that.  Excuse me, SL.  I learned some too… I was scratching my head going into this to think of how a simulated environment could be better than a real-world environment.  Then a presenter showed me the schizophrenia experiential location in SL.  That gave me pause… perhaps there is some use for this.  Nuts… I’ve just doomed myself to hours and hours of research and trying to figure out how to build something now.

5. Glad I met… Ed Bowen, who works with Dallas TeleLearning.  He was a presenter who took the time to email all participants beforehand, give them his presentation slides, his background info, his delicious account, his blog, and encouragement for everyone else to email there fellow participants.  Then he set up a discussion board for post-conference thoughts on what was discussed.  Plus, he visited with me a couple of times during the rest of the conference on different topics and what’s going on for us in our lives.  If I’m modeling a future presentation, it is after Ed.

6. And Madison… that’s a good place to have a conference.

I’m adding a link to my technorati profile. My profile is

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http://www.technorati.com/people/technorati/eabbey

Yep… I’m still going here. I’ll limit myself to 6.

5. Two Books – There are two books that I have read that have shifted my view of education into the next gear. One, without surprise, is The World is Flat by Friedman. I find that if an educator has read the book and is making this list, the book finds its way on it. The other is just a little more obscure to the average person, but equally unsurprising: Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson. That book gives a practical summary of web 2.0 technology and their application in the classroom. But more importantly, it talks about the philosophical shift in teaching, as we go to the “read/write web”. He outlines several shifts in the way educators must think. This was one book that, immediately after reading it, I designed and offered a graduate course to educators based on it.

I’m sure in future posts I’ll highlight the important thoughts I see in these two works, as well as others (I make no pretense that when I make this list in five years, there will be different books on it). However, there are some things that stand out apart from the specific content in the books. One is that they create for me the sense of urgency. We can’t sit and wait… we must change now. The second is the networking element. Before Will Richardson, I knew nothing about the community of 2.0 educators out there. Using him as a starting point, I’ve connected to many others with many ideas.

6. Schwinkie

This too will need some explanation. Schwinkie is a former student of mine. Schwinkie isn’t his real name. I could have used a generic fake name, like Tom or Fred, except that I have had a Tom and a Fred, and they would think I was talking about them. So I have to use a name that I will never come across. For that, I look back to my clever students. As my wife was pregnant with our second child, I offered students extra credit to come up with a name to name the child. One came up with Schwinkie. Seriously. She liked the sound of it. That would never fly in Scrabble…

So, we’ll call this student I had Schwinkie. Actually, it could be any student. This is a student who our school was not serving, who was at risk for dropping out. Schwinkie was doing things which just didn’t make sense… staying up to study until 2:00 in the morning, and then sleeping in until noon the next day and missing the test, stuff like that. Schwinkie was also acting out to get attention. In fact, Schwinkie would have been out of school already, had it not been for the work of Dwight Laidig, perhaps the best teacher I have ever seen in connecting to the un-connectable.

At any rate, this isn’t a fairy tale. Schwinkie is still a student, a junior this year, and still at risk for dropping out. We’re hopeful he will make it through, but we haven’t got the panacea to share with you on how we did it. As a principal at this school, in visiting with Dwight and our Dean of Students, it really helped me realize the magnitude of the need to find alternative forms of education. We have to do more, to find other options. We have lived in a static world of the educational structure, and we haven’t progressed nearly as fast as I thought we would on NCLB.

I really like Schwinkie… I spent a lot of quality time with him in my office (I’ll let you imagine the circumstances that led to those). I really like Dwight… I think he is an amazing educator that I wish I could have supported better. And because of this, it has changed my view.

This continues from my previous post.

3. Gurus. I use to list these separately, but it is getting too long. I’ll admit, I gravitate towards the best teachers in a building, and I’ve been blessed to work with several in different roles. If I’m looking for a quality in assessing how good a new teacher is, the desire to seek out the best the best indicator I see to future greatness. Because this is my blog, I’ll list a few of the ones that have had the biggest impact, including Birgitta Meade, Ola Nordqvist, Barb Schwamman, Roger Henderson, and Dwight Laidig. Granted, there are many more that I consider equal in quality to these, but these are the ones that have rubbed off on me. Dwight, I’ll talk about later. Perhaps the most influential here, though, is a teacher by the name of Mark Johnson. Mark taught in my discipline (talented and gifted, language arts), and did high amounts of technology integration. I took a graduate course from him after my first year of teaching, and while I already had the desire to change the face of my classroom on the basis of emerging technology, in him I had the model.

4. NCLB – Here, I could elaborate quite a bit. I’ll admit my biases… I’m not a fan. Like many educators, I find it too simplistic, over-relying on standardized “one-size-fits-all” assessment, punishment based, and created without the input of educators. It emphasizes a different skill set than what I see as essential learnings, and it emphasizes a specific group of learners… those that are barely non-proficient. As a talented and gifted instructor, I’ve been abhorred at the resources given to help a small subset of students to acquire a rather arbitrary distinction (in Iowa, it is the 41st percentile on the basic skills test) while grossly ignoring the needs of the gifted.

As a building principal, though, I had to move beyond my griping and deal with the reality of the situation. The person who has helped me here is the author Todd Whitaker. He boiled it down to this: regardless of your vies on public mandate, you as an educator have a duty to meet them. What’s more important is your approach. He described a two-circle analogy, where the bigger circle represents all the things you want to accomplish, and the smaller circle is the mandate. Regardless how you feel about the size or importance of the two circles, if you don’t find a way to address the smaller circle, it becomes the bigger circle.

There will be many mandates for teachers, be it government-led (NCLB, Iowa Core, Rigor and Relevance) or district-led. Right now, NCLB dwarfs the other ones and affects my job as an educator on a daily basis. Therefore, it is irrefutable: NCLB is an important event in my educational outlook.

I think this is an excellent reflective topic all educators should attempt to do… it isn’t easy (you think your done, and then a week later, you realize… “oh there was that one student”). I’ve added this to the graduate courses I offer teachers, partly because I think it is valuable, and partly because, after they see my list, they realize how I came to be this way!

1. You teach the class. I was fairly bright in school, and therefore very bored. I’m sure I drove my teachers crazy because I would multi-task while they explained things like the scientific process or how to do long division, and it looked like I didn’t care about what they taught. Which wasn’t entirely true, I did care about it the first time they taught it, or the first time I read about it if they had us do homework. The second through 967th time was a different story.

In my sixth grade social studies course, I had an average teacher who drilled and repeated us through western hemisphere social studies. Which was a repeat of the textbook she had us read the night before. So, I didn’t read the textbook (why would I do that?). I made the mistake of leaving the textbook in the room, which made her upset. To appease her, I agreed to taking the book home to read, and promptly left it in my study hall room, which was another waste of time.

There was a time when I decided to read the textbook, because I got interested in something else. These things were never important… when I was in 2nd grade, I drew a map of the world, complete with capitals. In fourth grade, I created a fictional baseball league, complete with statistics and trading cards. I can’t remember what the deal was in 6th grade… I remember I was drawing something and not paying attention. Suddenly, she stopped the class and said “Evan, do you want to teach the class?” With everyone’s eyes on me, she gave me her prized overhead pen before I could respond, and said “here you go.”

And to her surprise, I taught the class. It wasn’t hard, I had mastered her pedagogy already. A check-your-understanding quiz straight from the book with a five minute tangent about each question. I think she got a little more upset when I didn’t reduce to tears, and when I started my tangents by saying “Now, when I was driving in Costa Rica, the streets were…” Needless to say, she didn’t let the smart aleck have another chance to teach the class.

This event latently taught me two things. 1) Teaching isn’t as hard as some people make it look. Not everyone can do it, but more can than you’d believe. It’s really conversation at the root of it. But more importantly, 2) the content is not sacred. You’d think from the way most classes are structured, knowledge is an entity only meant to be handled and distributed by the elect. Or as one of my professors referred to it, “The way some do it now, it’s not teaching, it’s Eucharist”. As a teacher, I’ve never been surprised at the ability of my students, especially the gifted and talented and underachieving ones that I have had. Many have been smarter than me.

2. The 8th grade webpage builder. I’ve already explained this story and its effect on me in my last post, so I’ll let it suffice.

Hello! I am brand new to edublogs, having used classroom blogs on blogger and livejournal before. I am also new to Heartland Area Education Agency, centrally located in suburban Des Moines.

In the state of Iowa, there is a level of support between the state’s department of education and the local school districts to help provide services to those schools, especially in areas such as special education, curriculum and assessment, leadership training, and technology. That’s the AEA. Being part of the agency, I get the opportunity to work with other prominent people in education, but also multiple districts and great teachers.

But, let me back up. I went to Luther College in Decorah, majoring in Philosophy and English Education. After a substitute teaching experience in Eagan, Minnesota, my first position was at North Winneshiek MS/HS, in rural Decorah (no, there is no urban Decorah… consider it more rural Decorah). Graduating class there was about 30 students, and I taught 6 different grades in an 8-period day.

While those details might bore you, there are some interesting things about my history. I consider myself part of the last cohort of “digital immigrants”. True, I’m geeky. I’m very intuitive when it comes to new things, and I like to play. I used some Mac computers growing up, manipulating the LOGO turtle, running the lemonade stand, and mastering Aldus PageMaker. But, I did not use the internet at all until my sophomore year in college, and I received my B.A. without ever having done internet research (in 1998). I went into the world of teaching not having any knowledge of technological integration or internet research.

The irony here is that everywhere I’ve gone, I’m assumed to be a “digital native”. I’m young, or comparatively young. I’m good with technology. I must have grown up with learning on the internet. When I teach graduate courses for teachers, especially those who are fully digital immigrants and self-admittedly struggle to learn technological skills, it’s hard for some of them to believe that I sympathize with them… I’ve been there!

The other interesting thing is that, I believe, I have a unique view of how education will drastically change forever. I have this view having grown up as a student in the old world, and having taught only in the new world, and there are many times when I marvel at the difference. I’ve seen this transformation at a time when I am reflective in educational pedagogy and aware of my surroundings. All of this leads me to believe that I’m seeing something very special. It’s more than the initiative du jour– the outcomes-based education, or guided reading, or whole language, or whatever else is said to be the future of education, only to be recycled into something else. In this case, education has no choice but to change.

The first year I taught, an 8th grader showed me how to make webpages. Before that point in time, I believed that the ability to make webpages would require many years of intensive study of programming languages and such, and was beyond the ability of those without the time to learn it. After that point, I realized that all the technology out there is not only neat, but learn-able. I could do it!

So, like every good educator, I experimented. Our class made webpages as a project. It wasn’t the most educationally sound, and I had several things I needed to fix, but overall there was one important success… the kids loved it! They came to my class early and stayed late. They talked about it during our basketball practices (note: I’m a better educator than basketball coach, as our record will indicate). There was a buzz! I was hooked! Other teachers began to notice, which is always very flattering for 1st year teachers. I began to dabble in other things… making powerpoints (another epiphany), making newspaper pages. I was now the tech guru of the high school. People were coming to me with their technological issues (all to the amusement of the 8th grader who showed me webpages in the first place).

And then… I lost my job. Well, not technically. Technically I left for an English position at Postville High School, but my job was due to be cut because tiny North Winn High School was closing and being whole-grade shared with Decorah. But in a way, I had really grown to enjoy working closely with the students on fun learning projects. Luckily for me, Postville was just as good of an environment.

I remember starting there, having talked about my past teaching projects at North Winn. Now I was an “expert”. I was put in charge of the district website and yearbook, maintaining computer labs. I continued to experiment with technology, but here is where I feel I learned how to teach with technology pedagogically soundly. I had built my theme-based units in literature to seamlessly incorporate not only technology but the district standards and benchmarks. It didn’t seem like technology was a project anymore, but rather an extension of the course.

The rest of my career to this point goes as follows: I spent 3 years at both of those schools, and then I had the opportunity to take a leadership position as the Director of Technology for Howard-Winneshiek schools. I was very blessed to work with the teachers at Howard-Winn, as I’ve never seen a whole group of teachers so open to learning and infusing technology in the classroom, regardless of “nativity” level. I had the chance to work closely (and eventually replace) one of the best educators in technology in Mark Johnson, but I also had the chance to work with many teachers new to technology, ready to try things. We became a leader in the state in our implementation of technology.

I then received the itch to be a principal. Being a principal isn’t something you just do one day, I found out. You have to prepare for it, through education, exposure to recent trends, building up experiences, and most of all, networking with colleagues. I received the opportunity as an interim principal at Grinnell High School. Here is where I really began to experience how education is changing in the state of Iowa. Topics like diminishing enrollment, NCLB, alternative education and dropout rates were (and still are) critical issues for high school principals.

I found out that I’m not a principal… at least not yet.  There is a changing world in education, and I wanted to be part of it.  That’s why I’m here, at Heartland AEA, in my first year as the agency’s director of online learning and a technology consultant.

And really, that’s the point of this blog.  I want to throw out my perceptions on the way things are changing, and my ideas on how this shapes education.  I consider myself in a lucky position, having unique experiences from teacher, director, and principal roles.  My desk sits right next to people who are state-wide leaders in things like the statewide Iowa Core, the IPDM, special education in the state of Iowa, and so forth.  You will find me as someone who has more questions than answers, and really enjoys getting into discussions with people on the way education is changing.  Please feel free to comment on this blog.  Point me to your own blog.  Give me some other food for thought.  I hope this to be a learning experience for me.