Beyond the Rule of Three

By Leo Reynolds

As a classroom teacher, I attended regional and national conferences annually and a rule that I always tried to follow was what I called the "Rule of Three." Whether I attended a full-day workshop or a three-day conference, I made it a personal goal to share what I had learned with at least three people in the building or district, and then implement at least three new things in my classroom. As I offered professional development then, just as I do now, I almost always shared this rule with others, often encouraging them to at least try the rule of one!

Reflecting about my days at Educon 2.3 at the Science Leadership Academy over the weekend, I realized how much this has changed over the years due to web 2.0 tools and a varied approach to a conference.  As a participant, there were so many ways that I shared beyond my "Rule of three:"

• @mmkrill, @kditzler, and I took collaborative notes via Google Docs, which I shared via a discussion forum with one of my teammates (located in MN) in the JHU/ISTE program.
• Despite this, I did post a few tweets and for those that pertained to administration and supervision, I used the hashtag #jhuiste for the rest of the JHU/ISTE students.
• Other tweets were shared as well with the traditional #educon hashtag for all to follow, both those at Educon and those participating virtually.
• Finally, the conversations at Educon were rich and thought-provoking, and my input was sometimes at a small group level, whole group level, or one-on-one.  For several of the sessions that I attended, we collaboratively took group notes in a Google Doc or other format to document our ideas and conversations, and share with others.

Reviewing those four areas, it really isn't possible to accurately identify how many people I shared with, but it is definitely beyond the "Rule of Three!" This would not have been possible without an arena for sharing and collaboration, so I once again thank everyone at SLA and especially @chrislehmann for being such a gracious host.

In terms of implementation, I will still use the "Rule of Three" to begin, but hopefully will be able to go beyond this as well.  As the notes indicated, there was much learning, but three take aways for now include:

1. Administrator strategies to support visual literacy (via The Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush).
2. The use of the Expectancy Value Theory in terms of learner motivation (via @crafty184).
3. A Roadmap for Change (as an administrator - via @NMHS_Principal).

There is so much more to learn from everyone who was also sharing beyond the "Rule of Three," but this will take some time and more reflection!

In the mean time, feel free to share your three implementation ideas!

     

URL stats

The Power of the PLN in twitter came through again this past Sunday afternoon.  I shared a fur.ly link of suggested sites for the improvement of multiplication facts provided by my fifth grader’s teacher.  Thanks to the help of gardenglen and some others, this link was shared quickly and within a half hour, there were 86 views for the fur.ly site that I created.  For those who are new to fur.ly, it is similar to other URL shorteners, but it allows for multiple URLs to be collected into one site.  This is great for sharing multiple sites for a similar subject/topic.

Process I used:

1. Obtained teacher list of four sites for multiplication
2. Found sites and copied their URLs into fur.ly
3. Fur.ly created a unique URL for these sites
   
4. Shared this via twitter
5. Did some laundry and let the dogs out
6. Returned to twitter to see a few retweets and 86 views (134 today)
   

For furly, the number of views is listed right at the top, next to the URLs.  If you click on it, then there is a graph showing the number of views over multiple days. 

 

 Another great site for viewing stats that I just learned about via twitter is favstar:

 

This allows one to see who is favoriting his/her tweets.  As mentioned in a previous post, I am the master of this!  It is an easy process that requires no password.  I added my user name and I had results for my most popular and recent tweets that were favorited, as well as the tweets that I favorited.  The greatest part of seeing results of what I’ve favorited, is that I can see a slew of other people who have favorited the same tweet and they might be people who I do not already follow.  Now, I have found more people to add to my PLN.  Yes, I can do this via Mr. Tweet as well, but this is a fun, new visual way based on specific tweets.

Where did I put/bookmark that?

One of the greatest web 2.0 tools for making my life easier was Delicious (then Diigo). For once, I could find all of my favorites from multiple computers in one place. I no longer had to go to various computers to find that great site that I had once found. Of course, the best part of social bookmarking is being able to share with others. This also made my life easier, as others could view my favorites via tags. Since I work with multiple groups of people, this was a great way to share resources pertaining to them without too much difficulty. As I discovered new great finds, I could bookmark them for others and myself!

So, now time has passed and other web 2.0 tools have surfaced that I enjoy and use, mainly Cover It Live (CiL) and Twitter. Both of these are preventing me from sharing resources via social bookmarking because I’m housing resources in each of them and never finding time to share them to Diigo and Delicious.

Twitter is the worst case of this. I’m favoriting all of the time, especially on my phone via TwitterFon. I just checked my stats, and I have over 700 favorites in Twitter. I can guarantee not many of those have made it to Diigo/Delicious due to the fact that I’m doing the quick scan process and not actually taking the time to delve deep into the resource and bookmark it on Diigo/Delicious. Yes, there have been those times when I bookmark things from Diigo to Twitter, but to do it the other way around requires more work and time.

As for CoverItLive, when I am taking notes and adding resources here during professional development, I definitely do not have time to also bookmark. A great feature of CiL is that one can go back and review what had occurred during a session. Once again, time prohibits me from actually going back in and going to those links, reviewing, and then bookmarking them. The fact that I know that they are in there eases my worries about going back in and doing that extra step. Unfortunately, the result is me asking the question (often during training), “Where did I put/bookmark that?” I immediately start by going to Diigo, and when I cannot find it there, I can only assume that it is in one of the CiLs that I’ve participated in/created or in one of my abundant favorites in Twitter.

How do you handle collating all of your resources from multiple apps?

Flat Classroom via Twitter

Twitter Time

Those of you who know me, know that I resisted Twitter for my lack of time in my life! So, when I joined in at NECC, I appreciated the warm welcome, and I discovered the benefits rather quickly. Today, though, was the most beneficial, as I found out about Vicki Davis' workshop on Flat Classroom via twitter, and then joined the backchannel that she set up for it using Chatzy. In Chatzy is where I connected with many great people and found so many more people to add to Diigo and del.icio.us. Here's the quick list for you:

http://del.icio.us/brightideasguru

http://del.icio.us/cmatzat

http://www.diigo.com/user/coolcatteacher

http://del.icio.us/lnitsche

http://www.diigo.com/user/mrscaldwell0

http://www.diigo.com/user/lnitsche

http://del.icio.us/lauriefowler

http://www.diigo.com/user/abubnic

http://del.icio.us/n2teaching

http://www.diigo.com/profile/n2teaching

http://groups.diigo.com/groups/Ad4dcss

http://groups.diigo.com/groups/educators

http://del.icio.us/johnpeters1959

After that great sharing moment, then Vicki connected with Terry Freedman via Skype and he shared his site for his Web 2.o Project book - free to download at http://snipurl.com/2voeg.

There was so much more, but I felt it important for me to share the above information quickly and show it to others who may have been hesitant to Twitter like me.

It was still difficult justifying doing all of that when this has been my first real day in my office since NECC, but it is just one more thing that I will have to figure out to juggle in our crazy busy lives. Professional development is so important and then so is meeting the needs of the districts. One helps with the other. Unfortunately, sometimes, I have to do more managerial things first, before hopping on to fun stuff like ustream, chatzy, twitter, etc.