As you can imagine, fighting this disease has taken an indescribable toll on the family in many ways, one of them financial.  To that end, Tommy’s friends and family have organized the Trails for Tommy 5K and Children’s Races, to be held on Sunday, October 19, 2008 in Hopewell, NJ.

If you live anywhere near the Hunterdon/Mercer/Bucks counties area and would like to do your body and Tommy’s family some good, come out and have a crack at the course (download a PDF form from the site or sign up online here).  If you can’t make the run but would like to donate time, gifts, or money, or even just read more about Tommy’s story, you can do all that at TeamTommy.net.

While the course is called “Honors British Literature”, in all honesty we skew very English in the literature we read. In addition to wanting to give my students some exposure to non-English British culture for balance’s sake, I also wanted to satisfy their curiosity at seeing some street signs in Welsh. I turned to fellow teacher, Twitterer, and ex-pat Englishman in Wales Dave Stacey for help.

Over the course of a few weeks, Dave and I corresponded via email and arranged for him to Skype into our class on 13 March, when he spent about 45 minutes speaking with my students. In preparation for the chat, they brainstormed questions for Dave, using a page on our class wiki as their “scratchpad”. Dave obligingly researched (and posted answers to!) every question my kids could throw at him prior to our chat. Dave and I had a test run to make sure both of our school networks could handle the Skype-y awesomeness, then linked up for the real deal at 11:15am EDT / 3:15pm GMT. Dave fielded questions from my students on the Welsh language and pronunciations, culture (popular and otherwise), and even his personal experiences moving from the south of England to Wales for university and eventually settling down and starting a family there.

I was impressed on a few levels: first, at Dave’s willingness to make himself available to a bunch of American high school kids long after his work day ended (not always easy for a new dad). Second, my students could very easily have sat there and been passive learners. They chose to engage themselves in the process, more or less interviewing Dave the entire time. They shaped the discussion, the lesson, and, ultimately, their own learning.

In our session debrief, I asked my students what the value of an experience like this was for them – not why it was cool, or new, but what value it held for them. Responses centered around these major concepts:

• first-hand access to a living primary source
• interactivity & having the ability to probe and ask for explanations & clarifications
• hearing a non-American perspective; combating ethnocentrism
• greater investment in preparation
• greater overall engagement due to all of the above

It was such a positive experience that when Christian Long contacted me to brainstorm some ways to link up our British Lit classes, Skype was my first thought. For this experience, my students will be leading his sophomores through discussion of issues pertaining to Hamlet and Shakespeare’s tragedies. They’ll be meeting each other in a few weeks; I’ll be sure to post reflections on that shortly thereafter.

How do you use Skype in your classes?

Here, then, is the full text of the email I sent to my school’s Special Education department this afternoon:

For my grad school internship, I created a wiki website for the HC Special Services department: http://www.hcss-wiki.org. On it, you will find information on a variety of topics including behavior support, New Jersey classifications, and various online resources for special ed teachers. It’s just missing one thing: your input.

The reason this site is a wiki instead of a regular website is because I wanted the teachers of the department to have an ongoing say in its development. There is a very simple 3-step tutorial on how to add content to any part of the site linked off the main page, so I encourage you to visit the site and add your thoughts and experiences to any part of the site. There is a section specifically for general hints and tips (perhaps from the more experienced teachers to the newer ones?), but of course you can add to or modify any existing information.

The value of wikis is in group collaboration. I hope you will find time to make a contribution and help this tool grow. I am available to you if you have any questions.

I hope the tone and content of the email were sufficient to get people poking around and maybe even contributing, but there’s a part of me that’s pessimistic about how frequently it will be used – and that’s not a reflection on the faculty. I think there’s a missing component here that I am unable to offer, at least not within the confines of the contracted school day: training. I feel like I’m offering these folks a potentially very cool, very powerful utility, but withholding the instruction manual.

And if you don’t know why that’s a bad thing, just ask William Katt.

It’s a work in progress, so like a bad steak, there are some areas that are more done than others. I’ll be working on this throughout the weekend, but if you have a sec, I’d greatly appreciate any feedback you can offer. Here are my three main goals for this site:

1. A demystification of some legal and practical information regarding special education in NJ via “plain English” explanations
2. Empowerment of special ed teachers through information dissemination (specifically w/r/t behavior management and curricular accommodations)
3. Building of community within the department through invitations to (eventually) collaborate and add to this document

You can leave comments here or hit me up at damian@apaceofchange.com with any constructive feedback – I would appreciate knowing what you think is helpful about the site as well as what you think needs improvement (or what’s missing that you think should be there).

Here’s the address: http://hcspecialservices.wikispaces.com     http://hcss-wiki.wikispaces.com

Thanks, network! Happy December!

Recently, Doug Belshaw linked to a fantastic social action project that manages to combine two of my personal passions: technology and football (is it putting on airs for an American to call association football by its proper name?). Kristian Still, a tutor at Taunton’s College in Southampton, England, started The Panini Project with his students.

The Panini Project takes its name from a company that produces, among other things, stickers based on professional football teams. Kristian’s project aims to collect a full team set of home jerseys for:

1. Each of the 20 teams in the Premiership (top level of professional football in England)
2. His local pro team, Southampton Football Club (for whom Kristian also works)
3. The England national team

This amounts to 352 jerseys, each of which retail for around USD 80 (that’s over USD 28,000 worth of polyester, folks). Kristian and his students will then donate these jerseys to needy school and community football teams from Third World countries.

If anyone ever questions the value of utilizing read/write & telecommunication web technology, point them in the direction of The Panini Project. Kristian and his students are using the world’s most popular game (sorry, MLB, it’s not really a World Series, you know) as a basis for social action, and they’re using a wiki and email as a means of spreading the word as far and as wide as possible. Kristian was even good enough to spend a half hour or so Skypeing with me this morning to talk about the project.

Even if sports aren’t your thing, think about the ramifications this could have for similar social action projects, global or local.

I know we’re a minority here in the colonies, but if you’re a footy fan and have any old home tops stashed away, dig ‘em out, give ‘em a wash, and send them to:

PE & Sport
Tauntons College
Hill Lane
Southampton
SO15 5RL
United Kingdom

Hey, Taunton students. You guys are doing great things for people you’ll never meet, but who will appreciate it more than you’ll ever know. Keep up the good work.

Update: Per Kristian’s comment, I should have made clearer that his students are seeking old, unwanted jerseys for this project, not brand new ones.

I teach an interdisciplinary course called Multicultural Studies. More accurately, I co-teach with a Social Studies teacher. It’s one of my all-career favorite courses to have taught, due to the overarching themes of promoting understanding, acceptance, and diversity (buzzwords, to be sure, but descriptive enough for a blog post). Two of the main ideas we stress are 1) the importance of social action in promoting social justice and 2) the benefits of an inclusive society. In our introductory unit, we discussed a growing minority population at our school: LEP/ESL students.

We discussed the positives and negatives of our school’s ESL program, and even had one of the ESL teachers visit to give a frank talk about the current state of the ESL program, a topic about which our students were entirely uninformed. It’s hard to blame them; after all, there are deep dividing lines that run between the native English-speaking population and the ESL population, and in our case, both groups are partially at fault.

Collaboration #1: My co-teacher and I reflected on the topic after school one day, and we decided that we needed to follow Dr. Sonia Nieto’s advice and take the learning one step further by making it authentic. Let’s not just learn about the systemic inequalities and stroke our chins, let’s DO SOMETHING to CHANGE IT. We kicked some ideas around, and ultimately decided that we should get our class together with the ESL class in a lightly structured environment, provide some rated-PG social lubricant in the form of snacks and soda, and get them talking with one another about their respective experiences.

Collaboration #2: In the four days I was out, my amazing co-teacher not only arranged for this to happen with two of the ESL teachers, he pitched the idea to our 29 kids, had them prep some questions they would want answered, and executed one of the most valuable learning experiences in which students in this course have ever participated (top 5, no doubt!). Although everyone was a bit shy at first, the three teachers involved split the kids into small discussion groups, everyone got themselves some snackage, and kids talked – not about Twitteresque banalities, but really talked - mostly about their vastly divergent experiences living in the same country. Kids who have never wanted for a material good in their lives listened intently as other students told of walking for days to cross the US-Mexico border. One student showed the bullet wounds he received from a local gangster in his hometown. Most of the ESL students were Spanish speakers from Latin America, but there were also French-speaking Congolese students. Luckily, an Ecuadorian exchange student in my class also speaks fluent French, and was able to translate for them as well. By all accounts, the 85-minute session was a resounding success. I just wish I had been there to experience it, too.

Is our job here done? Not by a long shot. Without a continued connective presence, this will slip back into the category of, “Hey, Remember When We Did That Cool Project?” It’s up to us as teachers, but also up to the students whose community this is, to build upon what got started last week. We can schedule future “socials”, but the kids on all sides of the linguistic divide have got to follow up outside of the classroom, too. They alone can take down the classroom walls and continue building their own authentic, first-hand learning experiences that could, if they wanted them to, outlast high school. Those kids and teachers achieved many of the goals that “Web 2.0″ folks (myself included) tout: collaboration, authenticity, meaning, personalization, and discussion.

And they didn’t get within a country mile of Wikispaces to do it.

Original post follows:

InviteShare contributes to the community feel of Web 2.0 by allowing users to sign up for waiting lists for invite-only beta projects (a la Gmail, back in the day). Of course, once you get your invitation to your selected project and sign up, you’re expected to give back to the community by handing out any invites you accrue. It’s all very karmic.

Personally, I’m excited to try out GrandCentral, and the waiting list doesn’t seem too long (21). I’ve only heard of two other projects currently on the list: Pownce (think Twitter with file attachments) and Spock (a person-oriented search engine – I plan on blogging about this next week), so I’ll be spending some time this weekend learning about all the other offerings. I think this is a fantastic service that can really benefit “the little guy” – the tech enthusiast who doesn’t have the top-level access of more prevalent or established bloggers/”names” in the field.

Finally, in the spirit of sharing and community, I have a priority access code to share with you for MP3Tunes.com. This free service allows you to upload and stream your music files (MP3, AAC, WMA, OGG, and others), enabling you to listen to your collection from anywhere. It’s a tidy alternative to setting up your own server, and every new user starts off with 1Gb of space. All users are eventually upgraded to unlimited storage, but the code I have gets you an express upgrade (otherwise, plan on waiting 2-4 weeks from the time you fill up your initial 1Gb). It can only be used three times, so the first three folks who leave a comment here (with an email address I can send it to) get it.

And you lucky folks who get the code? You’ll be given three codes as well. Please pass ‘em on!

…we have to be cautious though with the digital divide that we don’t further disadvantage those without access to the technology outside school – a difficult nut to crack….

This brief comment got me thinking about my own experiences with students and their ability to access the Internet. In responding to Paul in the comments, I got off on a bit of a tangent:

… if lack of access in the community is a widespread enough problem, I wonder what role the school could play in providing that access on an evening/weekend basis? And perhaps not only access, but instruction as well, perhaps in an adult-learning model?

If we are going to commit to instructing not only students, but administrators and parents, too (as folks have suggested elsewhere in the edublogosphere recently), should schools commit to providing community Internet access and education, especially in communities where folks may not even own computers?

I’m not talking about an ISP in the sense of Verizon or Comcast; I mean a full-on commitment to keeping a free or minimal charge drop-in computer lab open with a small staff to assist people as needed, and maybe run adult-ed-style classes on navigation, search skills, online banking, online safety/security (e.g. avoiding phishing/email scams), etc.

So many questions come to mind as I think this through: would the existence of such a service go over well in your community? Would taxpayers find this an acceptable use of school funds? Even if schools don’t have an obligation to do so, should they step up in the name of social action and provide this service to the communities that need it most? Furthermore, could it help to combat this seemingly pervasive attitude of alarmism (and, dare I say, ignorance?) such as appears in this month’s Scholastic Administrator (please also read John Pederson’s response) [both via Christian @ think:lab]?

Do any of you have any experience with such a plan in your district/state/province/country? How successful (or unsuccessful) has it been? Could it work?