Next Steps

Our next steps

In Somerville in 2011-12, we'll continue to test texting "groups," pilot and tweak our dashboard views with principal, teachers and families, and continue to develop the efforts of the Parent Connector Network and the broader schoolwide communication toolkit. We also want to learn what happens when the ePortfolio seeds across Somerville High School!

In 2011-12, with funding from the Digital Media and Learning Hub at UC Irvine (itself funded by the MacArthur Foundation), we'll be inviting OneVille participants to share their work and ideas in person and online with others concerned with how youth and adults in public schools can innovate new uses of everyday tech. One goal for the year will be to keep honing online documentation like this wiki's. What online reporting would best link diverse communities exploring such uses of commonplace and low-cost tech in public school communities?

Mica is moving to direct CREATE (the Center for Research on Equity, Assessment, and Teaching Excellence) at the University of California San Diego. www.create.ucsd.edu There, with new colleagues and community, she'll be focused particularly on developing communication infrastructure for partnership between people in a university and local K-12 teachers, families, and young people. Learning how to help network local teachers to each other, youth to teachers, and mentors to youth is another particular focus. She'll also work hard to link SD innovators to Somerville innovators!

So, we'll be able to work bicoastally to improve the communication infrastructure of public education. We can work toward a "toolkit" in education if many of us create and test free/low cost tools and strategies for supporting communication and collaboration between the diverse people who share young people's lives.

The Next Layer: Connecting to Folks Doing Similar Work in Other Communities.

We'd love to spark a lively exchange on this website between people working on similar things. It takes a local network to raise a child; it takes a national network to brainstorm the infrastructure for doing it. So, we've tried to create a lot of places where people could add comments.

Want to talk further?

Our goal with this website has been to connect to, inform, and support people doing related work elsewhere.

Are you working on improving communications in your own school or community?

Contact us directly at xxxxx [someone's email? or cut this?].

How'd we do in sharing our own first efforts?

We want to connect to more people improving communications in public education and so, we've been experimenting with sharing our own work online!

Tell us:

• Did we format our examples in useful ways?
• Did we offer too much information on what we did, or not enough?
• Do you want to know more about what we've been doing?
• Would you contact us to share what you've been doing?

Some issues we’ve been thinking about and haven't resolved:

• Audience: can researchers, teachers, families, and youth all share one form of documentation? (That’s what we’ve tried to do here.)
• How do you most effectively show examples of local efforts and innovations in public education? How many words can you use? When might you use pictures or videos? How/when can words and visuals go together?

Another Next Layer: National Networks for Sharing Local Efforts?

Think about it: What might happen if lots of youth, families, and educators started sharing out their educational innovations more generally, online? Innovating solutions for public education is fun -- and it pulls people together. In an era where lots of people are criticizing public schools' teachers, parents, and students, we need to connect to others who believe that there’s no limit to what these partners can do.

We've been collecting some examples of information-sharing that we'll leave here to prompt thinking:

JEDD, I'M NOT SURE THIS LAST SECTION FITS HERE; SORT OF A TANGENT TO THE BRAIN NOW

• Teachers communicating informally w/ teachers in other schools. Twitter?

• • general network of teachers talking on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23edchat

• • subgroups, chatting on Twitter: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/twitter-expanding-pln?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=post&utm_content=blog&utm_campaign=howtousetwittergrowyourpLN

• • explicitly progressive ed networks on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/EdEquality and individuals: y http://twitter.com/#!/TeacherReality

• • Twitter hashtags: possibility of rapid collaboration? (for future thinking on this: http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2011/05/02/why-twitter-can-be-the-next-big-thing-in-scientific-collaboration/

• Official documentation of innovation, but supporting educators to seek/advocate for reforms themselves? http://www.edutopia.org/stw-replicating-pbl

• "Expert" teachers, communicating via official sites, with teachers. http://myboe.org/portal/default/Content/Viewer/Content?action=2&scId=100051&sciId=1482

• Formal sites where “experts” try to communicate complicated ideas verbally

Teaching Diverse Students’ Initative: core ideas that are hard to explain?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQePuaUqtUg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19e48qBIQTw

A whole lecture: http://www.gse.upenn.edu/pcel/programs/dvmsac/videos

• random videos posted by all? type “good multicultural teaching” on YouTube.

Here are some other examples of info-sharing models we’ve been looking at:

Peer 2 Peer University.

Connexions: http://cnx.org/content/m37276/latest/?collection=col11292/latest

IBM’s Reinventing Education initative (see Kanter’s “Change Toolkit.”).

Open Learning Initiative (“Learn how to do xxx” videos –http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/forstudents/freecourses/visual-communication-design

MIT Open Software program

Lesley: e learning

Flossmanuals: simple, somewhat visual documentation: http://en.flossmanuals.net/audacity/

http://learn2teach.pbworks.com/w/page/15779288/Learn-2-Teach,-Teach-2-Learn

ADD MORE E.G.S HERE.