Teacher in Development

Via Educause: From Today’s CMS to Tomorrow’s Learning Support System
Begins at the 6:00 min mark  to 15:00 min.
First of all, I’m totally thinking that this little video could be useful in my class with Ed tech coordinators. I have a really stimulating group of students who are coordinators at a local university. They are in charge of educational technology development and deployment. CMS’s are a regular point of discussion, but what I always find….bothersome, is how often CMS and LMS systems are actually just metaphores for control. Finally a student speaks out, and offers something different to think about…

A Snapshot of how NetGenners learn: The Commandments
Text and reference books simply don’t cut it any more: Net Genners go online for info seeking.
CMS should hold updated info re class. Students won’t read a manual to figure out what you’re going to do in the class, they’ll hop onto your CMS to see what’s coming. (But the question is: will your CMS system meet that requirement?)

Busy-work is a waste of time. Show me the value of what we’re doing.
CMS should be an extension of what we do in class, not just an added load to carry around.

It’s not about recite and regurgitate.
Learning happens as we explore. CMS should not be a doc drop, but a start point to explore the web. How can we “get into it” and get dirty.

The web is social.
“I’d rather email you than talk to you in person.” (Maybe I feel stupid to ask a question in class.)

Too much text = boredom.
NetGenners are visual in general.
CMS should be visual environments, not text graveyards. Please populate with interesting video, pictures, sound etc.

Net Genners need guidance on evaluating online sources of info. 

PDF - “print document first.”  Interesting quote: “A paperless society is a myth.”  There is deeper value in what we hold to read. 

Invitation to harness ecommunication tools NetGen uses. (IM, blogging, Myspace etc.)

NetGenners and what they know how to use:  re: software and eTools: they typically know what is relevant for their lives. CMS needs a tour and tutorial.

CMS should be designed for folks who have no net clue. And this could be for both Teacher and Student.

Some of my comments:
PDF - “print document first.”  Interesting quote: “A paperless society is a myth.”  There is deeper value in what we hold to read. 
I find this point to be very interesting. Perhaps we think we’re saving paper and printing costs by PDFing everything we want our students to read. It doesn’t seem to be working this way. While I don’t do this at all actually, I have been thinking a lot about going “greener” with my classes. I was thinking about emailing documents that we would read in class, or simply provide links to valuable online content. But I think there is something really important in this quote: “A paperless society is a myth.”

One of my edTech students, in the middle of a big discussion around e-books and would they ever replace the standard text book, said that we would never fully leave behind paper based reading material. There’s just something special about feeling the paper, holding the book, that adds value to the reading process. I love reading, and I think I totally agree. I would never sit down to read a e-version of the Lord of the Rings for example. (One, I’d likely go blind.) But there’s just a connection that happens with a book that doesn’t happen with computer screen. What do you think about that?

Is paperless a real option in the “green” classroom?

Back to the CMS: The point that really seems to come through clearly for me is that a CMS should be a vibrant place. It shouldn’t be a box. It should be a tool to access the world the way that is most relevant to the students who use it. This seems to be in stark contrast to how most school/university CMS environments function.

Sure, there needs to be some structure and direction, but I think students are crying out for more freedom to explore and get dirty with their learning.

These are just raw thoughts, but I wonder what you think about them?

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Seems like the TOEIC could be on the way out of South Korea.
Via the Korea Times on October 20, 2006 - South Korea’s Education minister says that the government is developing a new “in-house” English evaluation exam.

Top reasons for TOEIC’s phase out:
1. Businesses are complaining about poor English skills from college grads.
The problem is not that there aren’t enough jobs, but that the English skills are so low that new grads just can’t be hired.

2. English ed is too scholarly: Not enough focus on day-to-day use of language.

3. Companies complain that the TOEIC is not accurate.
Students do great on the exams, but when they have to hold an English conversation while on the job….

According to the article, the South Korean government is conducting feasability studies into creating their own exam that would incorporate speaking and conversation into a nationwide language assessment tool.

Earlier this month, the ministry said it is conducting a feasibility study on launching a new English test, composed of four parts: reading, listening, speaking and writing. It estimated some 2 million Koreans would take the exam every year.

The Korea Times : CEOs Press for English Education Reform

I wonder something: If the Korean govt. throws the TOEIC out and successfully deploys their new English assessment exam, will they be able to come up with accurate results? Or will South Korean CEO’s still be complaining about accuracy in another five or ten years?

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If you’ve ever gone freelance, or if you’re doing it now, you can likely identify with this:
You start off with a great big empty (or next to empty) bank account. The bills keep rolling in. The fridge keeps emptying. The kid needs new shoes. The car needs gas. The rent/mortgage needs paying…you know the deal.

That’s what I call BIG motivation. So you roll up your selves, and start working as hard as you possibly can in order to bring your income up. A few weeks or perhaps months pass, and you look at your schedule with great satisfaction: You’re loaded with classes. Cash flow is happening again, and the fam and the bill man are happy.

Packed teaching schedules are great for your wallet or purse. They’re great for keeping  your bills paid each month, and they’re great at keeping food in your fridge and your family clothed and taken care of.  But is a packed schedule good for quality classes? Sure it’s wonderful to have a full day of classes ahead of you, but how much quality time have you spent prepping them? How long have you spent on your own professional development as a teacher? (Remember: He who dares to teach, must never cease to learn.)

This has happened to me a bit. My schedule has filled out rather quickly, thank God! But I have noticed that I find myself outside my house most of the day. I’m either teaching, or commuting across the city for another class. At first, with only one or two classes, prep time was abundant. But as more and more clients came on board, I’ve seen my prep time dwindle down to the leftover scraps and crumbs of the day.

I recently read this post over at the Hello, my name is BLOG blog. Very thought provoking. Scott tells a story about a vetran toastmaster who always attended the toastmaster meetings:

During one meeting in late 2004, I spoke with a man named Les. He was a veteran of the organization, but told me that he still came every single week.

When I asked why he said: “Because the best swimmers are always in the pool.”

HELLO, my name is BLOG: The best swimmers are always in the pool

“The best swimmers are always in the pool.” Replace “swimmers” with teachers, and you have yourself something cool to think about. 

I’m sure every single reader here will agree: professional development, and planning are vital to providing relevant and engaging classroom experiences. But for some reason they are also usually the first thing we sacrifice as business, or the school year picks up. At least that’s how I’ve been noticing things in my own life these days.

Creating and sticking to planning periods are vital. I don’t have the luxury of a whole day to do this, but then again, few teachers do. But I do have a few hours here and there that I can scrape together. Perhaps it comes down to wiser uses of time, and learning how to place proper priority on the activities of my life.

Last night, Sunday, I spent a good hour planning out my classes for the week. I waded into my bloglines account for content ideas based on the needs of each of my classes. It was great. Before long, I was saving files to my delicious account to access later from my student’s computers. I was burning a podcast onto CD (I don’t have an mp3 player yet…:( ) and was printing off a few articles to use as reading material. My total prep time was only an hour or so, but I was able to get 90% of my classes ready for the week.

It felt great to wake up today knowing that I had a well prepared for full schedule ahead of me.
Again, I’m not expert on time management. The conversation is wide open: How do you leverage your time to plan and hone your skills as a teacher?

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Really interesting article over at the Selling To Big Companies blog around the role of Thought Leadership and landing new customers.

I freelance. Finding new customers is pretty imprtant to me, so I really found this short post to be of interest. Key thought:

In today’s crowded market space, one of the best ways to stand out from the competition is by becoming a thought leader. What does this mean you need to do? Basically, thought leadership is about willingly sharing your ideas, insights and expertise with others who can benefit from them.

Selling to Big Companies Blog: Thought Leadership Attracts Customers

I would say, at least in Mexico City, that the ESL industry keeps close pace with the street side taco stand as one of the most crowded in existance.  So how are the “little guys” going to get noticed? How are you going to start getting people’s attention without an advertising budget or high profile PR campaign?

I have to totally agree here with Konrath. Share what you know. Forget the “scarcity mentality” and my thought to tack on here: start blogging, but link locally.

Here’s how I’ve slowly started developing relationships on a local level using my blog. 1. I’ve started seeding my bloglines and netvibes readers with local Mexico City bloggers. (Screened to personal taste and interest of course…) 2. I’ve started regular commenting on a few, and conversations have begun. Nothing to do with “working together” yet, but the all important relationships are beginning to form. As a result of a series of comments, one local blog author has already linked to me, and has even done some low level explorations of this blog.

This is where, if the prospect is at all interested, can see how I work as an English teacher. They can learn about my teaching ideas, my “methods”, my philosophy etc, and can get a pretty good “digital feel” for how I am in person. A sort of preveiw if you will.

Perhaps I’m not a great ESL thought leader…I don’t mean to even imply that, but this blog is where I am freely throwing out my ideas and ways I work to the rest of the world…and maybe even to a prospect.

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I can’t complain about this: but as of late, I’ve been working A LOT. That’s the main reason why my posting rate on this blog has trickled down to next to nothing. I really like the fact that I actually have lots of work to do these days, when you’re freelancing and have no one else sending you stuff to do, steady work is vital to survival.

But I’ve been noticing something about my work: It has me really really busy, and being busy has meant that I have a lot less time to spend on planning classes, and finding content (I don’t use books).  My class schedule is completely full. In fact, I’ve had to turn away folk wanting to work with me as I still haven’t taken the next big step of hiring additional teachers. Now when you combine this with a family, work with my church, and trying to keep a semi normal social life with friends, there’s just not much time left over for doing things that, and I borrow from Steven Covey here: “sharpen the saw.”

I really identify with a recent post from AJ over at Effortless Acquisition entitled Burnout. He has some valuable insights around the need to step away from the daily grind and take a break:

They (breaks) provide time for teachers (and learners) to rejuvenate. They provide time to get away from the subject matter, do other things, and let your brain work unconsciously for a while.

Without this, we grow stale. Doing the same thing over and over again without a break is a recipe for burnout.

Effortless Language Acquisition: Burnout

Yep. Totally agree. While I don’t feel like I am drawing close to a mental break point, I have noticed a great lack in the time I have to really think about things. I have less time to think about, and plan classes, and I have less time to think about other things that are unrelated to work.

And one thing that I totally miss, is my contact with the blogsphere. Before I got into freelancing, I had way more opportunity to wade in, float around, and dig into the great ideas and practices that are out there. I felt like my own practice as an English teacher was greatly inspired by what I read from other blogging teachers. I felt connected, as if I were a part of a vibrant professional development community.

Now I feel like I’ve lost touch, and though I don’t think I ever occupied a place of greatness in the blogshere, I sure do feel like I’ve lost pace with the rest of the pack.

I still manage to skim through my bloglines account on a semi-regular basis, but I rarely have…or make…the time to slow down and dial in on the cool ideas I so often see there.

And AJ raises another pretty important point: If you freelance, vacation times are really difficult things to take. If you don’t work, you don’t get paid, and we all know that getting paid is pretty important. 

So it’s like freelancers are stuck in a vicious circle. 1. You live to find work. 2. You work to live. 3. You live to work. 4. I don’t think there’s a 4 - - the circle has begun.

So what can us freelancers do to tame things a bit? Afterall, I didn’t go for this way of life to become a slave to my work. I chose to freelance because I wanted the benefits of being able to be my own boss. I wanted to have the complete freedom to cancel a class if my son or wife got sick, and needed my presence at home. I wanted to have the freedom to live OUTSIDE an office, and be able to move around more at will. I wanted the freedom of having a better income. I wanted the freedom of doing things the way I thought or longed to do them, without “company rules” etc to slow me down.

And in almost every way, I have gotten those benefits. But that time issue, the time to recharge, think, and discover new things, seems to be suffering. And the vacation thing…well…totally. If I stop working for a week or two, it would seriously hurt financially.

So what to do?

1. I must learn how to stick to my budget.
If you want a great way to learn about finances, check out www.daveramsey.com he has a great podcast. Over the months, my wife and I have been learning about how to make and keep a budget. The making bit is the easiest part. The sticking to it, now that’s where we’ve really been suffering a lot. But it’s so terrible: we do great at spending every penny we earn on our budget before we actually get paid…but when the money actually comes in, we always seem to find a way to break some part of the budget. Very frustrating, but a work in progress I guess. But what I see here for us freelancers, is that we simply must learn how to put away money. We need to learn how to live on less than what we earn. Doing this for a while will help us move into stronger financial position to actually take a break for a week or so. If we simply would save a little every month, maybe we could actually continue to pay ourselves via our savings accounts when we go on vacation.

I know for me, budgeting my income better - no, I lie, STICKING to my budget will open great opportunities for mini breaks and vacations throughout the year.

2. Regular Planning Days.
I’ve experienced this with my own work: You can become so busy with your classes that you actually stop being effective in them. You race from class to class, your schedule completely filled out,  but what are you bringing with you that’s valuable? If you’re really turned onto the idea of delighting your clients, and if you’re really sold out on the idea of offering personalized content that actually MEANS something to them, you simply can’t run for long at full speed, and no planning time. Been there. Trying to stop that. So here are a few things I’m going to try out over the next weeks:
    A. Go to bed earlier…every single night. It’s a proven fact: The less you sleep, the less effective you’ll be the next day. Help your body out, and give it some rest.
    B. Wake up earlier, and use the extra hours to do things that really matter.
    C. Block off a nice chunk of time, at least once a week, to plan all classes for the week. Make this practice a habbit.
    D. Look for exercise activities. I’ve known this for years, but I fear that I’m a great procrastinator. Exercise reduces stress, and helps prevent burnout. We all know this, but how often do we really make time to do it? I know I don’t do it nearly enough.

So, I have my work cut out for me. I’m sure there are other things I could do to help keep myself fresh, on the cutting edge, and in good mental health…but for now I think I have a starting point. What do you think? What do you do to blance your life, and keep yourself fresh? I would love to learn from you!

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It’s not easy to find "fair trade" items in Mexico. Last week, however, that all changed a little. We went to a nearby grocery store and found this amazing selection of organic products…and that’s when I noticed the little "fair trade" sticker on the coffee can.

Fair trade! Yeah! My wife and  I immediatly picked up the coffee. If anyone reads this blog inside of Mexico, I’d like to encourage you to check out the site (www.comerciojusto.com.mx — contents in spanish!) and see how you can support this important project.

You know, many people - and I’ll go ahead and include myself here sometimes, often feel like attacking poverty is something out of reach sometimes. We think: "What can I possibly do to help bring an end to it?"

Well, we don’t have to make it complicated. Maybe we can’t destroy poverty in Africa, or Mexico, or wherever you may find it, with one quick stroke or donation. Powerlessness is just a state of mind. The truth is that there are many ways we, the little people, can make a difference. Perhaps it will be one person, one life at a time, but little by little, we would be making that difference.

I was really excited that Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize. His work with the Grameen Bank in India is quite inspiring. This guy was normal. He just decided to act. I was reading an article about him today, and I found some really cool quotes that I wanted to pass along to you:

"You cannot go on having absurd amounts of wealth when other people have problems of survival," he said. "If you can bring an end to poverty, at least from an economic point of view, you can have a more livable situation between very rich people and very poor people, very rich countries and very poor countries. That’s our basic ingredient for peace."

Micro-Credit Pioneer Wins Peace Prize - washingtonpost.com

…and this quote from the Nobel Prize committee:

"Lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty," the Norwegian Nobel Committee

Micro-Credit Pioneer Wins Peace Prize - washingtonpost.com

Poverty and peace go hand in hand. So want to find a practical way to help another human being break out of poverty? Buy fairly traded products. If you’re in Mexico, you now have a place to start. If you don’t live in Mexico, and you’d like to explore the idea more, why not  get curious here:  Fair Trade on Google.

You might not destroy poverty across the world, but you CAN make a difference in someone else’s life. Think about it.

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