Wanted: A Kickstart

During my freshman summer of high school, I went out with a guy who had a motorcycle. It was an old motorcycle with a kickstart. Forty years have gone by, but I can still remember sitting behind him as he started it. He'd lean the bike slightly to the left as he kicked down on the right, all the while twisting the right handle bar to give it gas. Then there'd be that slight jerk forward before we were on our way.

I woke up this morning realizing that the only way I was going to meet my goals for this class was to create a kind of kickstart for the rest of my digital learning. Otherwise, I'm afraid that I won't get back to it and really make it a part of my everyday routine. During this transition, I'll need to lean slightly to the left (basically just keep this shift going) while I kick down on the right (log onto social networking sites) as I twist the right handle bar (use digital tools in authentic ways in my classroom) to give it gas. The goal, of course, is to not stall out or give up when this motorcycle of mine slightly jerks forward in my attempts to be on my way.

I'd like to propose that my final project kickstart a continuation of my digital skills and social networking. It will need to be part group and part individual. The group portion begins Tuesday, December 1st when our staff will meet for a technology hour. Originally, we had planned for this meeting to be a time to unveil a mock-up of our proposed school wiki. As luck would have it, there is now a "consolidated" communication committee being formed that will attempt to create an online "consolidated look" for our new district. This makes sense though it has forced us to create an open-ended timeline and to acknowledge that we won't be able to create a new school wiki before the December 1st meeting.

Our group has used GoogleDocs to keep an updated list of school websites/wikis that we admire. At the end of the last USM class, we chose a wiki template and began to determine the number of pages we would need to include all staff and curriculum at our school. We want the wiki to be as inclusive as possible.

We've also used GoogleDocs to plan our one hour staff presentation. At this point in time, we will open with a showing of the "Did You Know? 3.0" YouTube video clip. After some discussion, we'll move onto sharing Morse Street School websites, wikis, blogs, Google Reader and Twitters. Next, we'll help an audience teacher-volunteer to create a blog in front of the group. We'll end with the YouTube video clip titled "21st Century Learners" and a brief discussion followed by a non-tech staff survey question such as "Where would you like to go next?"

Sometimes things happen for the best and I think that this particular line-up of activities may be more entertaining and informative for our staff than a simple wiki mock-up might have been.

The areas I'd like to pursue individually are in the form of setting up classroom podcasts and in becoming a consistent follower of Twitter for Educators.

I've never used a podcast but I think it'd be an effective tool to use in helping students hear improvements in their choral reading of poems and singing of songs during the holidays. Beyond the holidays, I'd like them to hear their individual reading of poems and scripts prior to performing in our end-of-the-year student plays. A weekly podcast on our blog would help us to chart growth along the way.

Last night I was checking out freetech4teachers.com and read about lists that can be created on Twitter. This helped me to realize that there was a way to organize my time and attention so that I wasn't all over the place on this tool. Despite the fact that I've been a member of Twitter for about a month, I still haven't USED it. I need to kick this start the hardest and get going. What better way than to make it a part of my final project?