KM in Education

TFA Teachers Blogging

Today, while scanning my visitor stats, I discovered the Teachers' Lounge. I found it a highly appropriate follow-up to my posting about Teach for America (TFA) as a spark for innovation in public education. The Teachers' Lounge Wiki was created by current TFA member Rob Lucas. As he explains it:

Over the course of last year, my first year of teaching, I spent many a late night planning lessons for the following day. During those nights, a single thought gnawed at me: Thousands of other teachers across the country were doing just as I was, and thousands more had done so every year for decades. Yet there was no way for me to fully benefit from the experience of all those who had come before.

I’ve created this website to change that. It’s a new type of collaborative website called a 'wiki,' where most pages can be edited not just by a webmaster, but by any registered user. That means you can post lesson plans, links, handouts, PowerPoint presentations—virtually anything!

It is this blend of entrepreneurism, familiarity with technology, and understanding of educational challenges that generates innovation in education today. The next challenge for these education innovators will be to disseminate their successes into classrooms beyond their immediate reach.

Independent school networks

U.S. independent schools, by virtue of their smaller networks, are in a great position to tap into the resources of similar schools around the country. I spoke today with Ed Hu at Harvard Westlake in Los Angeles, and was struck, for example, by how easily he could contact a school of like size and culture in New England to request advice for starting a capital campaign. Independent schools know each other well, and the staff from such schools quickly develop informal networks across the country from attending conferences and years of working in the sector.

How can we help traditional public schools and their staff reach the same point? Where they can easily draw upon the expertise and experience of schools like them? Some education support organizations facilitate such connections, but otherwise, schools operate largely in their own spheres. Sometimes they do reach out as one teacher from Seattle shared with me. Her school had identified a similar urban school in California with demonstrated success in student achievement, then funded a trip for selective faculty to learn from the school's practices, only to find that the school embraced a different culture and their practices were therefore not appropriate for the Seattle school.

My suggestion is to look more closely at how independent schools form their networks and, if possible, model similar processes for traditional public schools.

Weblogs in Education

Today I decided to explore how far weblogs or blogs have permeated the education world. Blogs promise to be a technology that changes the process by which people interact. It's a much faster, easier, and cheaper way to communicate, collaborate, and share your thoughts. The education world may have to pick it up quickly, simply because adolescents are flocking to this new form of self-expression.

Some educators are definitely hard at work identifying new ways to use blogs in their teaching:

Anne Davis, who maintains an insightful blog on the subject, has created a website that provides a great overview of effective weblogs in the classroom.

Will Richardson maintains Weblogg-ed, another useful site for educators about using weblogs and related technologies in the classroom. I personally like one reader study guide created by a Modern American Literature class at his school, complemented by the online parents' book club.

The Educational Bloggers Network provides a forum for teachers and education professionals to collaborate on the use of blogs for teaching and learning, especially in the areas of reading and writing.

Also, there are a growing number of content-specific sites such as Christine Terry's blog on bringing science into the classroom.

Blogs are also being tapped for other uses in education, but these areas seem to be less developed:

A mentor and entry year teacher used a blog to capture their experiences and reflections. It is a brilliant approach to capturing the process of being a new teacher while enabling him/her to reflect on it and develop a very useful resource for the future.

Technologists in K-12 education have also started blogs to share their learnings. I came across the K-12 Tech Guy and The Savvy Technologist as two examples at one school.

A handful of schools and school districts such as Meriwether Lewis Elementary School in Portland, Oregon and Kern County Superintendent of Schools in Bakersfield, CA are using blogs to communicate with their communities.

It will be exciting to see how increasing use of education blogs may change the process by which students learn and by which schools operate.