Imagine . . . District Virtual Learning Communities

Time is the greatest challenge these days -- time to finish editing the video pieces I downloaded to iMovie, time to figure out ways to use blogs as virtual Learning Community spaces that encourage professional reflection, etc. However -- this experience is forcing me to think outside my own comfort zone as I look for applications of all this technology -- applications that will result in district-wide learning communities. This is important because many schools still appear to be struggling with learning community issues (time and topics) that act as roadblocks for the self-reflective atmosphere that characterizes TRUE learning communities. So, after we (at Effective Schools) deliver a workshop at a school, we relinquish the L.C. follow-up over to the schools. This results in questionable follow-up experiences. If we move toward Application and Accomplished levels in online community atmospheres -- (offering points, of course), then we can build district-wide learning communities that target each of our newly-developed High Yield Strategy (HYS) Focus Modules, for example (Nonlinguistic Representations applied to Context Clues; Summarizing & Note Taking applied to Reference & Research; and HYS applied to the Research Process). Imagine . . . being able to formally connect and collaborate with groups of like-minded educators across the district in order to further pursue what was learned in a school-based workshop, without having to rely solely on whether an individual school (or workshop participant) can fit a formal L.C. follow-up meeting into an already cramped schedule! The virtual self-reflective L.C. related to any given focus module is ALWAYS available -- at a time convenient to all willing participants across schools all over the district. Imagine!!!

My Research Question

I'm thinking that I may need to change my research question . . . but I'm going to hold off on this until after I see what happens when I attend the SREB Curriculum Mapping module and the 2-day ASCD Curriculum Mapping pre-convention workshop. Perhaps I will see more connections and possibilities after I return in mid-March. In the meantime, I'm getting more familiar with the technology.

Walkthrough DVD Completed!

I was able to create an iMovie of the Walkthrough training and transfer it to a DVD (using iDVD) to share with other trainers who need to review a complex part of this training: the Instructional Analysis Tool. I also sent my iMovie to my iPod, so I can now review this walkthrough procedure as a movie on my iPod. I'm now working on a few other iMovies. But one thing I'm finding out -- is that editing movies is quite time consuming! There's that old "time" factor showing up again. :-)