Why aren't you trying any of these "15 Things For All Teachers to Try"?

I love this latest drawing from Sylvia Duckworth, inspired by Austin Gagnier (@Austin_Gagnier8).  If only some would  try even one of these things.  It would be a step in the right direction. A seat on the right bus.  A paddle on the right waka.

They are all such powerful and useful things to do I wonder why some teachers are not.  And maybe it is that they don't get why.  Or maybe their school curriculum has been overcrowded with other things to do.  Or maybe they do not have enough devices in their classroom. Or maybe they are afraid.  Or maybe they do not have the support of the leadership of the school.
What is your reason for not doing any one of these things?  I would love to hear.

Five tools for 21st century connected teachers - a story of connection.

Last week, my friend Melanie Matthews and I presented an afterschool workshop to the Connected Taupo Teachers group at Tauhara College.  Celebrating Connected Educator Month was a priority for us, and we modelled this connectedness in an unusual and unplanned way.
But I will give you a little bit of background to begin with.  Melanie and I live only a few blocks away from each other, but did not know each other before we had met online in the Virtual Learning Network (VLN). We also connected through mutual friends and decided to form a group in Taupo for teachers who wanted to share and learn from others.
Hence the Connected Taupo Teachers group was conceived and born at the end of 2013.  Supported by two more friends, Kristen and Angela, with ideas and resources, we have met each term to provide an opportunity for local teachers from all schools to meet face to face and share and learn.  Our facebook page is growing in popularity and each time we hold a meeting we see new faces which is awesome because it is achieving the purpose we wanted.
Our term 4 meeting was held this October, which is worldwide Connected Educator Month.  So we decided to focus on how to use 5 tools that help teachers become and remain connected.  Our presentation was based on a talk or discussion for 10 to 15 minutes on each of five tools - Twitter, Feedly, blogging, Diigo and the VLN.  The slides, along with links on the slides, can be seen here.

 So when it came to the day of the presentation, Melanie unexpectedly had doctors orders to stay at home and keep off her feet.   So coming to the meeting and presenting her share of the slides was impossible.  Luckily Melanie never missed a beat.  "Connect me up with Skype or Hangouts and I'll do it from home," she said.

So when I arrived at the venue, I connected my ipad via Skype to Melanie at home, and we co-presented, with me holding the ipad up when it was her turn to talk.    The group interacted with her, asking questions which she answered with aplomb!  

I reckon we did pretty well, modelling connected-ness.  

Ulearn14 conference was different for me this year because of tweeting

I have been going to Ulearns for a few years now, not all ten that have been held, but quite a few of them.  I really feel like I got a lot more out of ULearn this year.  I think the reason was that I tweeted a lot.  I decided that instead of making notes that I lose or get hopelessly out of order, I would try and record keynotes and workshops by taking photos of slides and writing 140 character tweets on what I was hearing.
And as a result, my tweets got retweeted and I made connections with other educators that I have not met.  If someone retweeted, then I made sure I followed that person, too, and in the evenings, as I sat alone with my miserable head cold and recapped the day, I looked through the tweets and remembered a lot more that what I would normally have done, and felt connected.
Visuals make all the difference, and so does the fact that you have an authentic audience. In addition, if you use "Storify", you can get all the relevant tweets up in order and make comments as you go.  I didnt have time for that just yet but it is something I will do.
As well as that, I was able to use Tweetdeck on my laptop to manage to review the tweets of the day with the hashtags #ulearn14.
So I have been slow to get on board with tweeting, as I felt that I had all the extra external contact I needed through Feedly and Diigo, but it did make my whole Ulearn experience much better: -  more useful and more memorable and more recollectable and more connected.
As I look over the tweets this morning, my favouriteimage of the day so far is one that came from an overseas tweeter @shirljud1 who retweeted a tweet that I made about someone at the conference.  Rings true on many planes.

Twitter, I made a mistake about you.  There is a place for you in my life.

The good and the bad and the ugly at ULearn Mobile Learning Day 2014

The Good
Today, we kicked off ULearn 2014 in Rotorua with the Mobile Learning Day.  I was clever enough to choose Tom Barrett's workshop on Learning as Inquiry for my first.  Tom had a model of learning through inquiry which was very easy to understand and could be applied to many learning situations.  Along with that model, he had Thing-linked a heap of digital tools which could be used at each stage of the inquiry.  Thanks for such a useful morning, Tom. Here follows a little storify of mainly my tweets as I listened in.  It is really great to be able revisit these tweets alongside his notes.  Great prompts for remembering.

The Bad
By contrast, I became frustrated and even angry at my afternoon workshop where the presenter had quite a few digital tools to address a pedagogy that, it was obvious that she knew very little about.  Now I don't want to sound like a know-it-all but when the tools were being used just for showcasing the tools, the workshop became meaningless.  There has to be some semblance of substance about the knowledge being learned.  You can't crowd-source knowledge for two and a half hours from a crowd that had very little understanding of the topic.  They were there to find out about the topic, and instead got to use some of the tools which could be useful once they had the knowledge.  They made resources based on their lack of knowledge for the rest of the time.
The Ugly
 I hate to see teachers going away from a workshop ill-informed, which is what they would have done.  Teacher pd time is precious, especially for those who have give up out of school time.
I have to admit, my feedback was pretty scathing.  And I am sorry for that,  because it is not easy standing in front of a group of teachers and presenting a workshop. However,  I do hope that she learns from that.  During my teaching life I have been taught to take on board good feedback and discard any negative feedback that you don't think is warranted, but act on what you think is warranted.   You don't need to argue or discuss, just do it.  However part of me still feels ugly for being unkind.
So that's it.  My first day at Ulearn 2014.  The good, the bad and the ugly.