Twitter Mentor Spreadsheet

The other morning my Blackberry started going nuts. I figured it was a bunch of spammers until I looked and saw that nearly all of them were from Kansas. A few hours later…..another group of 30 or so new followers.  I contacted one of them and she told me that there were about 150 students taking the class. I was thrilled at the idea of 150 preservice teachers learning from my PLN, but I also know the challenges that all new Twitter users face. In order to stick with it you must see a purpose. Sometimes the purpose becomes evident immediately while other times it might take weeks or months for it to become apparent. Most educators who stop using Twitter because they never see the true value in it. They never have that a-ha moment that makes it meaningful and relevant to them.

As the last group of K State students was signing up for their accounts this afternoon my phone was going berserk again. I could not help but wonder how many of the students would stick it out. How many of them will actually use Twitter? How many will experience that moment where they could never think of giving up Twitter because it has become part of what they do? I began to wonder if there was anything I could do to help them make that connection. All of a sudden it hit me. Why not try to connect members of my PLN with the students? We could act as mentors  and show them what we have learned by being part of a network. Within a couple of minutes I had created a spreadsheet and sent out the link to my PLN. Within 90 minutes we had 45 mentors signed up.

I cannot wait to see if the students come back to sign up to work with us.  I also hope others will take this example and run with it. Our PLN has so much to offer, but for the most part we are an untapped resource.  If you are a mentor I recommend sharing your email address so you can have conversations that are a little longer than 140 characters!

Maybe K State will send some of these preservice teachers to ISTE 10 in Denver?????

Jason and his son

About six months ago an idea started coming together inside of my head.  I wanted to “test” the power of my personal learning network. By April my PLN was firmly established and the value and power of Twitter was becoming more evident each day.  No matter how hard I tried to educate people about the benefits of Twitter the vast majority of people still turned their nose up at it. I set out on a mission to prove that Twitter was the most powerful tool that I had at my disposal.  I decided to see if my PLN could raise enough money to send a fellow teacher to NECC 2009 in Washington DC.  After looking over the people in my PLN I decided to ask Richard Byrne to be the guinea pig for the experiment. Since he didn’t have anything to lose, he happily  agreed.  Richard was already very popular on Twitter and also well known for his blog, FreeTech4Teachers. Since he had such a large support base, it only took two weeks to reach the $1500 goal.  I assumed the 2009 Newbie project would be the only one, but in the weeks leading up to the conference there was a lot of press surrounding the project. I felt like there was enough momentum and interest to do it again.

During NECC,  I introduced Jason Schrage as the Newbie for 2010.  I felt he deserved the chance to attend ISTE  which will be in Denver next summer. Is he more deserving than any of the other educators in my PLN? Of course not, but  I could only pick one person. I chose Jason because he stood out to me for a variety of reasons. First, he was not afraid to ask for help. My first encounter with Jason involved him asking for my help with a blog post.  It was evident that he was willing to investing his own time in learning as much as he could from his PLN. After a few months of working with him on a variety of projects I realized that he was an amazing teacher who had some fantastic ideas.  I already know our PLN can pull together to send a “rock star” to ISTE, but can we send someone who is not a well known edublogger?

This post is meant to rally the troops. In order to make the 2010 Newbie Project successful we  need your help. Please do not assume that a donation of just a few dollars will not make a difference. The idea behind this project is for hundreds of people in our PLN to make a very small donation. If everyone who has told me what a great idea this project is would donate just $5 we would easily meet the goal of $1600.  We are not only counting on your monetary donation, but we need you to help get the word out about this project.

Donations can be made on either my blog or on Jason’s blog using the PayPal button. Please add your name and contact information to the spreadsheet as well. There is NOT a column where you are able to list the amount you donated. After discussing this with Jason we both felt there was no need to put this on the spreadsheet.

Whether you are going to ISTE in Denver or not I hope you will consider supporting this project. Even if you are not an educator I hope you will consider making a contribution.  Jason teaches over 100 students face-to-face each year, but he indirectly affects hundreds (maybe thousands more) more by sharing his knowledge on Twitter and his blog. Please tell him thank you by helping send him to Denver this summer.

A couple of months ago I was asked if I would teach a session on personal learning networks at the fall inservice for my ESU. Of course I jumped at the chance to teach my f2f colleagues about the world I live in online. As I began preparing I knew one of the components I wanted to include was a back channel chat. I was expecting up to 25 participants in each of my two sessions and I wanted them to have a place to post their questions. Various people from my PLN agreed to be on hand to answer questions so I could keep presenting instead of stopping every few minutes to answer questions. I only had two hours to get people up and running on Twitter and in the Classroom 2.0 Ning which is not very long.

I put all of my presentation resources into a wiki to make them easier for both myself and participants to access. Shortly before the session began I tweeted out a link to the wiki which had links to various sites that the participants would need throughout the day. The first order of business was for my participants to create a Twitter account. It did not take long for me to realize something was wrong. All but one person received a message from Twitter stating that only one account per hour could be created. It turns out all of the computers in the lab were running off the same IP address. I let the people in the chat know what was going on and they asked what they could do to help. What happened next was truly amazing. Eight people from my PLN worked together to help me so I could continue. I could have continued without having the participants create accounts, but it was supposed to be a “hands on” session. The purpose was for them to get on and see how Twitter and Nings work. The following people came through for me when I needed them the most:

@kylepace
@web20classroom
@paulbogush
@kadaniels
@ellsbeth
@oswego98
@shellterrell
@jenniferward

Chat transcript (missing the first 15 minutes)

Someone in the chat suggested that they could each take a participant and create their Twitter account remotely. If you review the chat transcript you will see how seven people from the United States and one from Germany worked together to figure out how to make sure all of the accounts were created. They were able to coordinate their efforts and the results were nearly perfect. In just a few minutes my participants were able to log into their new Twitter account and we were able to continue as planned. They were able to watch in real time as my PLN worked on the Google Spreadsheet. One of my workshop goals was for my participants to understand the purpose of a PLN.  If they did not get it after this then I am not sure they will ever will.

Once my afternoon session was over the first thing I did was review the chat. I was moved to tears once I began to wrap my head around what had just happened. Eight people whom I have never met gave up part of their day to help me to make sure my workshop was a success. They were not going to walk away from the chat until they were sure everything on my end was running smoothly. Once it started sinking in, I began to realize that this is truly the best example of aPLN working collaboratively that I have ever seen. I can take credit for having the forethought to have a back channel, but I cannot take any of the credit for what took place in there. Watching those eight people work virtually with each other and my workshop participants was nothing less than amazing.

What touched me the most is that all of the people in the chat were there because they wanted to be. They invested anywhere from one to five hours helping me out. Why did they do it? My guess is that they did it because they get whatPLN’s are all about. To people who are not familiar with PLN’s we might appear to be a loosely connected group of educators, but to those who “get it,” we know that our ties are much stronger than they appear. I will never forget this experience. It was chock full of “AWESOMENESS!”

My favorite quotes from the chat:

@jenniferward: I’m so sharing the coolness of what just happened here as a result of Twitter and real-time collaboration
@kylepace: Do it! That’s what the PLN is all about! We hook each other up 24/7!
@jenniferward: I just tried to tell the teacher sitting next to me, but it’s 1:30 on a Friday and he couldn’t understand why I was so excited. You guys get it! So cool!
@web20classroom: If they aren’t in on it they don’t understand….thats why we need everyone in on it…
@shellterrell: I’ll be here at the last moment to save the day.
@shellterrell: I’m back! Doing this from my Iphone!
@oswego98: Sprechen Sie Deutch?
@ymiyru: collective intelligence…great foundation.

I am looking forward to comments from everyone, but especially from people who were part of this. I know I am not the only one who was blown away by this experience. Thanks again to my wonderful PLN. You guys ROCK!

I am giving a presentation to about 40 of my colleagues about how to form a PLN. I put together the following short video as a way to introduce them to some of the people in my network. I added words as well to enhance the video. There was absolutely no rhyme or reason to the placement of these words. The purpose of the words was to give people who are completely new to personal learning networks an idea of what they can do with their online colleagues.

My first experience with PBworks (formerly PBwiki) was in February of last year at a workshop.  I was an avid Wikispaces user and I was not overly impressed with PBworks.  I had forgotten about PBworks until my friend and fellow social studies teacher,  Jason Schrage , shared his planning wiki with me last spring. He kept trying to convince me that PBwiki was the way to go, but I dug in my heels and insisted on staying with Wikispaces.

I eventually caved in and set up my own PBwiki. I instantly liked it and decided it was just as good as Wikispaces. My only reservation about it was that I could not add a bunch of student accounts at one time.  I was adding some of my colleagues to a wiki we are using for a workshop next week and discovered that there is a feature in PBworks that will allow me to create accounts for students. It will work even if students do not have an email address.

To access this feature you will need to create a wiki and go into the setting and select users under the access controls. You will be given the option to state the  number of accounts you want and assign a permission level to these users. Once you click continue you will be taken to a page where you can change add user names for your students. The passwords for the accounts are automatically generated.  The last thing you need to do is print the page so you can share the user names and passwords with your students. It is that easy!

Several people have asked me how they can wrap text around images in a PBworks wiki. I had the same question this last summer and @kyteacher and @jgates513 came to my rescue.  Once you have uploaded your picture and have added it to your page you can change the properties of the images. Make sure you are in edit mode and right click the image. If you align it to the left or right you will be able to wrap text around it.

I still am a fan of Wikispaces, but I am loving PBworks.  Please share any tips or tricks that you might have for how to use PBwiki. I chose to cover these two things because so many people have asked about these things this week.