B.+Working+Notes

Add Will Richardson's blog -- staying positiive

Here is a link to Will Richardson's blog: [] Here is a copy of what I love about this blog. Maybe we could include these quotes in our video to motivate teachers? "Do use our network to connect to other students and adults who share your passions with whom you can learn.” “Do use our network to help your teachers find experts and other teachers from around the world.” “Do use our network to publish your best work in text and multimedia for a global audience.” “Do use our network to explore your own creativity and passions, to ask questions and seek answers from other teachers online.” “Do use our network to download resources that you can use to remix and republish your own learning online.” “Do use our network to collaborate with others to change the world in meaningful, positive ways.” ~Ashley

Posted: Change in direction: After the discussion during the last Elluminate session, our team decided that we are switching our project to one that is AUP related. (Our passion is here right now because our current AUP is outdated, and we need to get it changed.)

We have all joined the SAU AUP Committee, which will revise the AUP over the next two months. Our project will be to develop a presentation that can be shown as part of a New AUP Discussion with school boards, other teachers, and parents that will inform them about 21st Century Learning and Web 2.0. (A "Did You Know" kind of thing.)

Our PLP group is comprised of one to two teachers representing five elementary schools in our district. During our discussions we have discussed how excited we are with the concepts, ideas, tools, and more importantly, the community and network that we have begun to create as a result of PLP. At the same time, we discussed how disappointing it is for us to know that as one or two teachers from the school we represent, it has been hard for us to imagine how we can promote these ideas and perhaps change the culture of our schools on our own. As a result of these discussions, we have decided to pursue a project where we can somehow "pay [our learning] forward" by creating a professional learning community. For the first year, we thought we each could encourage a couple of our colleagues to join our group using a Ning. (or something like it) Our goal would be to have this community grow each year.

**Layer 3: AUP Encyclopedia** The networked, digital, and overwhelming information environment that AUPs address remain mysterious to many students and teachers. It is the evolving nature of the landscape that requires us all to adopt a lifestyle of learning, so that we can continue to harness its potentials. For this reason, support materials should be layered beneath (so to speak) the institution’s policy documents. This layer should serve 4 functions: The third function could be accomplished by organizing the support documents around the policies, where the structure of the document would draw attention to the aims and prohibitions established by the policy. This layer would also liberally link back to the policy document, frequently aligning support materials to the overall goals and mission of the schools and district. This layer of the institution’s AUP would also leverage many of the capabilities of today’s information landscape. **This layer could easily be a wiki, inviting ongoing revision and growth of these resources by professional staff, community, and even learners, where appropriate. This support layer would also include a variety of media: text, images, sound, video, and animation drawing in existing resources from other community documents.** Is the project two fold, revise the AUP and also provide PD for faculty in moving them to use more collaborative tools in their classrooms? I hear more above, support documents for community around policy, as well as best practices in using new tools and sites**.** Just wondering if you are looking at this as a two or three year plan, phase one being the acceptance of the new policy, phase two, rolling out the new policy to all district stakeholders, explanations of why the change, what is new, reasons behind the change, professional development offerings based upon what has changed that will now allow more access to web 2.0 sites and context within which to use them? Yes the project is two fold, however a bit different than you stated. We just placed these ideas here so we could begin working on them. We are members of a committee that has already started and is nearly finished with rewriting the AUP. We are focusing our project on LAYER 3 of Warlick's AUP guidelines as stated above. We are really looking at the 3rd function as boldfaced above. We have really blended our two original ideas to come to our present idea. We had decided to do a video that would be presented to inform our district of the possibilities now available to our staff and in turn, our students. However, after discussing this video and talking with our colleagues we came to understand that we didn't want to just throw these possibilities out there and have everyone feel, "What now." We decided to go ahead with our original idea to create a NING, understanding it would only be a beginning stage. (first year, start with a few colleagues from each of our schools)
 * 1) Educate the institution’s stakeholders about the emerging and evolving information landscape, its potentials and the tools that enable use to harness them.
 * 2) To promote established best-practice applications of the information landscape and promising experimental applications.
 * 3) **Support and promote the institution’s policies for the acceptable use of its information infrastructure.**