Don Buckley (my boss and the Director of Innovation at The School at Columbia University) and I met this morning and created a schedule to formalize our informal in-house professional development sessions. Here's the note that we composed this morning that Don just sent out to faculty:

Based on the success of the iPad App shares and our Tweetup, we’d like to host more meetups about new media literacies. The following dates and times have been set aside for these conversations. Please feel free to suggest other topics too! All meetups will happen in the Library.

Feb 29th (Wed) … Presentations (Powerpoint, Keynote, Prezi, GooglePres)
March 6th (Tues) ... The Gallery and The Tube
March 28th (Wed) … Twitter/PLN
April 2nd (Mon) … Infographics
April 11th (Wed) … 3D printing (other location needed)
April 26th (Thurs) ... iPad App share
May 7th (Mon) ... Google Forms and more Infographics with data
May 16th (Wed) … TBD
May 24th (Thurs) … TBD

don

We just had our first Tweetup at The School at Columbia University. (I was totally inspired by the iPad App Shares that Gina Marcel (@fpgina) initiated this year.) For about 45 minutes after school today, teachers and administrators joined together to talk about how we can/do use Twitter to build a PLN (be it a Personal or Professional Learning Network) and collaborate, share, learn with others.

My 3 immediate goals were for attendees to share:
1. How to find people to follow
2. What "chats" to join
3. How to use a hashtag

I showed Jerry Blumengarten's (@cybraryman1) ridiculously comprehensive list of educational chat hashtags: http://www.cybraryman.com/chats.html

In attendance today were:
Kathryn Kaiser (@110kaiser), Primary Division Head (K-2)
Kevin Fittinghoff (@kfittinghoff), Intermediate Division Head (3-5)
Belinda Nicholson, Middle Division Head (6-8)
Don Buckley (@donbuckley), Director of Innovation
Cristina Martinez (@cmfinlay), Server Manager Extraordinaire
Karen Blumberg (@SpecialKRB), Technology Integrator (5-8)
Stacy Bolton, Director of Communications
Nadine Renazile (@infobirdie), Librarian (5-8)
Nancy Wong (@scampnyc), Math Liasion (K-2)
Joyce Tsang (@jyc_nyc), Kindergarten Teacher
Catherine Georges (@CatherinGeorges), 7th Grade Social Studies Teacher
Clarisa Leal (@leal_cm), Spanish Teacher (multi-grade)
Talia Gonzalez (@TaliaGonzalez2), Spanish Teacher (multi-grade)

Based on the success of today's gathering, Don (my boss) suggested holding another share in two weeks. :)

http://teach21.theschool.columbia.edu/

http://twitter.com/teach21c

As I wrote in my last post, Teach21 was a professional development institute for 21st Century educators organized by faculty and administrators at The School at Columbia University. Every day there was a keynote speaker (Sree Sreenivasan, Howard Gardner, A.J. Jacobs, Karen Cator) and many half-day and full-day concurrent offerings.

Thursday, I offered a session about "Social Networking and Literacy." We started the 2.5 hours together with a discussion about literacy. I used to think literacy was just the reading and writing of text. Nowadays literacy is about learning how to comprehend/research/navigate/communicate/cite/re-mix/share all sorts of media.

We started off the session with a conversation about the new literacies and looked at a couple of sources:

• Wikipedia page for "New Literacies": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_literacies
• NCTE Position Statement: http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/21stcentdefinition
• 21st Century Literacies: http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/
• Henry Jenkins's "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century": http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/files/working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf

Then I showed a couple of projects where students publish individual and group work online and collaborate via shared access, commenting, hyperlinking, and other interactions. We looked at The Independent Reading Site that I set up with Marisa Guastaferro three years ago and the To Kill a Mockingbird book groups set up by Eve Becker for her 8th grade English classes. Both projects are described in this post: http://karenblumberg.com/social-networking-and-literacy-on-2511-at-600

Then we looked at ways to set up similar projects with other available technologies.

• You don't have an in-house Drupal photo server? Use Flickr, Shutterfly, Picasa and work with privacy and permissions.
• You don't have an in-house Drupal video server? Use YouTube and consider public/private settings.
• You don't have an in-house Elgg social network? Use Edmodo, Schoology, Facebook, Ning, Moodle, Twitter  to set up gathering spaces online.
• You don't have Google Apps? Use Shelfari or Goodreads to discuss literature.

Resources from this and other Teach21 sessions are here: https://sites.google.com/a/theschool.columbia.edu/teach21-resources/