Stephens Group Words for 2008

I recently added a cloud tag to my blog. It was interesting to reflect on which words I tagged most often in 2008.

21st Century Skills-- This year we added a new belief statements to our mission statement, "We believe all students need to graduate with 21st Century Skills". All of our professional development efforts have been aligned to support this belief statement.

MDMC2008- - MDMC stands for the Milwaukee Digital Media Conference. This year's conference was a huge success. We had 120 educators collaboratively work with us on real world digital media projects at the Milwaukee County Zoo. You can read more about the conference in an article published by The Milwaukee Journal.

One-to-One Computing- - This year The Stephens Group started a new division of our company on One-to-One Computing with four consultants who have experience working with one-to-one computing programs. We started a free social networking site around this topic and currently has 37 members from all over the country. One-to-one computing was also the topic of my comps paper and will be my dissertation topic too- so I'm sure it will be tagged a lot more in 2009.

PODetc-
PODetc is also a new division of our company. It stands for Professional Online Development for the Educational Technology Community. The online relationships that have been developed are truly amazing. We have had teachers and administrators from all over the world in K-12 and higher ed take our courses. On Monday we start our fourth session of graduate courses for educators. We currently have five courses aligned to the new ISTE NETS Standards for teachers.

Social Networking & Twitter- - As Tammy Lind, our director of professional development stated recently, "I have learned more from people on Twitter this past year than all of my professional development including my master's degree combined". Consultants need to be constantly learning. Social networking tools such as Twitter and CollectiveX have helped us reach out to our clients, share information with one another, get just-in-time support and brought us closer together. I'm sure we will be leveraging these tools even more in 2009 as we broaden our personal learning networks.

Ultraportable Devices- This year through an internship with CoSN I had the opportunity to work on a report on ultraportable devices. I have become really interested in this topic as it also related to my dissertation. In my consulting work, I have been surprised that school districts have been somewhat reluctant to go this route with their hardware purchases. If we are really serious about providing student centered learning experiences, I think these devices have huge potential for changing the teaching and learning process.

San Jose Digital Media Course- This year we held a course at the San Jose Museum of Art to create vodcasts (or video-podcasts) using a method of inquiry that can be used in any discipline. We will be holding the course again June 22nd-29th. More information is available on our course wiki.

Wiki- 2008 was definitely the year of the wiki for The Stephens Group. The Stephens Group has seven wikis. Some are internal for consultants to share information and collaborate. Others such as our Information Technology Planning Wiki are to share information with clients. We use this one a lot with our clients as a means of sharing research and best practices when developing strategic information technology plans. Our biggest wiki, however is the wiki we created for this year's digital media conference. Educators worked in teams to create multimedia wikis around exhibits at the zoo. We are very proud of their work! You can view their wikis at http://mdmc2008.wikispaces.com/Directory.

It comes as no surprise that the most tagged word in 2008 was Web 2.0. Many of the technologies we are using as a company have not changed from 2007. However, what is changing is how we use them. Our company has consultants and clients in multiple states. Web 2.0 tools has really allowed us to work more efficiently and seamlessly across multiple timezones.

I'm looking forward to seeing what new words get tagged in 2009!

Celebrate!

I truly believe we don't take enough time to celebrate our successes in education. Last week we had our second annual Milwaukee Digital Media Course. Participants made wikis around an exhibit at the Milwaukee County Zoo. We as instructors were blown away by what they produced. We are so proud at how much was accomplished through the power of us (meaning the participants collaborative efforts). You can view their wikis at http://mdmc2008.wikispaces.com/Directory

MDMC Article

The Milwaukee Journal had an article on the Milwaukee Digital Media Conference at http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=779634

Advanced Wiki Tips

On Saturday I went to a workshop taught by Stu Woodward at Adams Middle School in Redondo Beach, CA as part of the Beach City Computer Using Educators.

In the past I had primarily used wikis for sharing text, links and collaborating with other instructors from The Stephens Group. Through the workshop I learned about a lot of other cool things you can do with your wiki.

For instance, I did not know that you could check statistics about visitors to your wiki by going to Manage Spaces and clicking on Usage Statistics. I was surprised to learn that our wiki from last year's digital media conference received a number of visitors from other countries.

I had also not played with the Insert Widget feature on the wiki (it looks like a little TV). The convergence of media that you can incorporate into your wiki is truely amazing. You can embed videos, audio, a calendar, maps, slideshows and even interactive surveys into your wiki. I tried embedding a google map of a satellite view of the Milwaukee County Zoo. I loved how once the map is embedded you can click on it and still manipulate the map just like you can in Google maps. The woman sitting next to me said she was going to create a wiki for her team and embed a shared Google Calendar for the group.

Another useful feature I learned is that when browsing other educational wikis you can add wikis that are of interest to you by clicking on the star next to the title. Then when you click on your user name at the top a window will appear with a list of your favorite wikis.

Reflection on my use of Web 2.0 tools in 2007

As I reflect on my work-life in 2007, there are a number new of Web 2.0 tools I’m utilizing that have become fully integrated into how I work and interact with people.

Skype allows you to conduct free calls over the internet or chat with others online. This tool has been invaluable in keeping connected with family and colleagues.

GoToMeeting is a form of web-conferencing. The Stephens Group uses GoToMeeting to work collaboratively on projects with one another and with our clients.n We also use it for internal training purposes.

We use GoogleDocs to allow committees to collaborate on documents such as Information Technology Plans. This saves a lot of time. Prior to Google Docs we would have to email versions of the document to committee members and make changes. The use of Google Docs has really streamlined this process because there is always one true version that everyone in the group can log-onto and update. Another great feature is you can see who made what changes when. I have all of my GoogleDocs linked onto my iGoogle web page which I have set as my homepage. I have also added useful Google widgets such as the weather, online dictionary and thesaurus and tabbed links to personal bookmarks as well.

We use CollectiveX internally within The Stephens Group. We have a number of different teams working on different types of projects. One of the advantages of CollectiveX is it allows members the opportunity to share contact information, discuss issues of concern, share information and upload files that need to be shared among consultants for different projects, and allows us to keep a shared calendar. Another great feature of CollectiveX is that it emails consultants updates that have been made.

Bloglines is a blog aggregator. What that means is it grabs new entries to the blogs I have subscribed to. This means that I can quickly read a number of entries without having to go to each blog individually. Subscribing to blogs has allowed me to keep on top of new trends and ideas in educational technology better than traditional media such as magazine subscriptions.

I wrote about Clipmarks in my blog entry on Shaping the Flow of Media. This tool has been great in helping me hang on to and catagorize things I find interesting when reading my blog feeds. The ability to “clip” and “tag” things to add to my library has been a huge help in organizing online content.

This year we had our first digital media conference. We were so impressed with the podcasts that teachers produced at the Milwaukee Public Museum. We are really looking forward to our second conference being held at the Milwaukee County Zoo, July 28th-31st.

In 2007, The Stephens Group developed two wikis. One for our Digital Media Conference as a way for our instructors to share resources with our participants, and one to help our clients with strategic planning on their information technology plans (The Stephens Group Information Technology Planning Wiki).

The addition of a clustermap to our blog has been a great addition. I love logging on and finding out where in the world people are reading our blog from. It has helped motivate me to keep writing.

In 2008 The Stephens Group will be learning more about digital mapping, the power of meta-tagging content, vodcasting at the San Jose Museum of Art (August 11^th- 13^th), using iPods to assist ELL students (see us at CUE), using social networking tools such as Facebook and Linked In to connect with wider audiences, as well as exploring the potential of gaming in education.

We hope you will continue to read our blog throughtout 2008 as we explore these new technologies.