What's the Next "Big Thing" at WSD?

Every year for the past few years we’ve been introducing something “new” and “big” in the Weber School District. 2006 was the year of our shiny new portal, MyWeber. In 2007, the teacher blogs were the huge hit when we introduced them at our first BrainBlast conference — which itself was another “big thing.” For 2008, I believe it will be WSD Online, our system for creating online courses, and WeberTube, our new media sharing portal.
WSD Online, which is based on Moodle, will be a huge hit because it’s so convenient for teachers to create an online quiz to have their students take tests, or create a forum to facilitate a group discussion, or provide a space to let students upload their homework assignments. WSD Online can very well be the solution for paperless classrooms. What teacher wouldn’t love that? However, I do think its acceptance and gradual usage will be a little slow due to its learning curve.
This year we also launched WeberTube, our media sharing portal for the employees. I foresee it becoming an extremely valuable service to our teachers, as media can be easily uploaded and then streamed right to the classroom. WeberTube kind of happened by accident, when I stumbled upon the open source PHPmotion media sharing script. I instantly saw the possibilities for such a service in the district, and though I ended up choosing osTube as the script for WeberTube, its presence in the district makes sense. My philosophy is that when we block access to a web site that is useful for educational purposes, however good our intentions are, we have an obligation to provide an alternative. Since we are blocking YouTube, which has plenty of “good” stuff mixed in with the “bad,” we should provide something to fill that void. WeberTube is our answer. In some ways it’s actually better than YouTube, since it allows audio, pictures, and documents in addition to video. Users can rate and leave comments on media, and groups can be created to better organize the content. The interface needs some cleaning up before it can become as smooth an experience as it should be, and there’s constant ongoing development with it, but overall it’s an excellent resource.
This evening I was listening to episode 13 of the Shifting Our Schools podcast. A topic about change vs. transition came up which I thought was especially good. Change is easy. For instance, we can introduce blogs into our district with very little effort. All we have to do is allocate some server space, bandwidth, and install WordPress MU with an LDAP plugin. Voila! We’ve created change, and now all teachers have blogs. The harder part is transition. How do you get everyone to actually use the blogs? How do you address the people who resist the change? How do you make sure they know how to use the new services? People need to be allowed some time to learn the new technology, adapt to the changes, and even grieve the loss of their old methods. This is the transitioning period.
I believe we are doing the right things to help our users transition. BrainBlast has been a key player. Teachers can come and learn about cool new technologies we’re offering and be given a push to making the transition. Yet you can’t push a teacher through that door — they have to walk through themselves. Cliche but true. This is why it’s important to identify the key technical teachers, the ones who are willing to shift to new methods, new ideas, and embrace the changes we are making in our instructional technology. They can be the ones who help us guide the other teachers through the transition.
E-volve, which we introduced this year, will help the transition as well. Administrators can sign up their staff and faculty for specialized training sessions, headed by an elite team of school techs: Justin McFarland, Casey Dalpias, Jeff Pfister, and Trent Bills. Each tech will organize their schedule and train small groups of employees on the technology available to them.
So what’s the next big change for Weber School District? What will be the next “big thing” for 2009? There are a couple things I would like to see. One is increased podcasting. Another is social networks.
I am hoping to see more and more podcasting projects as we go on. Jennifer Boyer-Thurgood, for example, has been an advocate of podcasting for quite awhile, and uses them with her third grade class. She has found they increase reading and fluency in students, and foster self-direction and self-reflection. Moreover, class podcasting is a fun project, with generally positive parent support.
I’d like to see more podcasting projects that involve “roundtable discussions,” where two or more employees or students talk about a topic. I’d like to see more live streamed podcasts, where the podcasters set up a schedule of when they’ll do the podcast, and use ooVoo or Skype to converse. Then EdCast could stream the podcast to a Shoutcast or Icecast server and relay it over the web, while simultaneously archiving it for later playback. Imagine how amazing it would be if groups of school administrators got together and held monthly podcasts to talk about the directions they wanted to take their schools, or if department heads podcasted about their goals for the year, or even if board meetings were all live-streamed and podcasted.
WeberTube may very well become the center for podcast activity. We could add the ability to organize audio into podcasts, and add subscription services and RSS feeds. I would also like to see Weber School District generating enough content to warrant a presence on the new iTunes K-12, which just launched in July.
As for social networking, this is something we typically block in our school districts (and as with media sharing, when we block something useful I believe we have an obligation to provide an alternative). Often, at best social networks just encourage aimless online meandering among students, idly chitchatting with their online peers when they should be working. At worst students can get mixed up with wholly inappropriate content on social networks.
According to the 2008 Horizon Report, the adoption of social networks in education is imminent. It’s not something we can sweep under the rug anymore. But we need to stray from our preconceptions of social networks for a minute, and figure out what our goals are. How can we create better learners with a social network?
Actually, I don’t even like the term “social network” because it doesn’t convey what we’re trying to accomplish. “Social” implies little or no direction, as if we’re just using it to chat with our friends or upload personal photos. This is why I prefer the term learning network. A learning network has clear goals in mind: engaging the students in a way that’s familiar to them and creating learning opportunities for them around every corner.
Here’s an example of how a learning network could be useful. In social studies, a teacher wants to teach her 6th grade class about Japanese culture. Instead of simply making the students read from a dusty old textbook or showing a boring video from the 1970s, she contacts a teacher from Japan, and sets up a learning network for the classes. Armed with parental waivers 🙂 , these two classrooms then engage each other, and collaborate on a joint project together. They are given the assignment to work in groups of two — one American student and one Japanese student — and take photos of simple objects from their respective hometowns, such as: mailbox, car, mall, clothing, girl, boy, school, bus, house, restaurant, etc., then create an Animoto video showcasing the objects. The videos are then embedded on a forum, and the learning network becomes the central point of activity for this collaborative project. The project could then be further extended to where the two students on opposite sides of the ocean interview each other and create a media-rich PowerPoint presentation about their partner, which they then present to their class.
How much more exciting is this learning opportunity for a young student than learning the traditional textbook-in-hand way? The students shift from the simple role of student to collaborator, explorer, and teacher. What other projects can you think of that could benefit from a learning network?