Next Steps

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

We'd love to spark a lively exchange between people working on similar things. It takes a local network to raise a child; it takes a national network to brainstorm the ideas for doing it.

Think about it: What might happen if lots of youth, families, and educators started sharing out their educational innovations more generally? Would a broader network grow, sparking all sorts of ground-up innovations in education?

Innovating solutions for public education is fun -- and it pulls people together. In an era where lots of people are “hating on” public schools, teachers, and parents, we need to connect to others who believe that there’s no limit to what schools and communities can do!

Want to talk further?

Our goal with this wiki 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 here at xxxxxx.

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

We want to connect to more people improving communications in public education!

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?

Our next steps

In Somerville in 2011-12, we'll continue to test texting "groups," pilot and tweak our dashboard with teacher 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 can innovate new uses of everyday tech from within schools. One goal for the year will be to keep honing our online documentation like this wiki's, so it supports and sparks other diverse communities exploring uses of commonplace and low-cost tech for pulling people together.

We'll also keep working to connect to other folks doing similar things where they live. One of us is moving to direct CREATE (the Center for Research on Equity, Assessment, and Teaching Excellence) at the University of California San Diego. link to Mica’s webpage? In San Diego, we'll explore analogous efforts and try to link SD innovators to Somerville innovators!

Our goal will now be to work bicoastally to improve the communication infrastructure of public education. We hope to continue to create and test free/low cost tools and strategies for supporting communication and collaboration between the diverse people who share young people's lives.

Examples of Broader Info-Sharing

We need infrastructure for sharing examples across schools and communities, too. Do you have examples of such information-sharing in education that you think are worth using as models?

Some issues we’ve been thinking about:

• What sort of info-sharing networks are needed across educational communities?
• What infrastructure is needed within schools, to make sharing across schools possible?
• 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 innovation in public education? How many words can you use? When might you use pictures or videos? How/when can words and visuals go together?
• Who is motivated to “share out” from their community, on a regular basis? Etc.

Some examples of broader info-sharing in education, using basic tech:

JEDD, YOU COULD ADD YOUR REVIEW HERE, ADD IN FROM THE OLD WIKI TOO; IF WE THINK THIS IS NEEDED HERE.

• 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.