Utilizing Twitter Lists

I recently read the blog post, Twitter Snobs or Efficient Learners written by Bill Ferriter.  In this post Bill states, "whenever the number of people that I'm following grows to more than 200, I simply get lost in the streams of information that come through my Twitter feed. At that point, Twitter becomes useless, doesn't it?"  This is something that I can relate to, however, I have found that you CAN follow more than 200 people on twitter and STILL can the benefits of learning from them.

Why would you want to follow so many people on Twitter?  Well, if you're only interested in following one group of people, say 2nd grade teachers, then maybe you can stick to less than 200.  During my first year on twitter I restricted my twitter use to following only elementary principals. At one point I realized that there were a lot of great resources being shared and  I wanted to share them with teachers in all of my grade levels and departments.  So I started following all kinds of educators on twitter.  I do agree with Bill that if you follow many people, when you check your twitter feed, it is hard to get much out of it.  This is why you have to utilize the lists function in Twitter.

If you go to my profile page and select lists, you can see what lists I follow, or just go here. (*Note-I don't have everyone I follow in a list and I would like to go through my tweeps and update it).  So, if I want to check my twitter stream to see what teachers that use Daily 5 are tweeting about, I can just click on that list.  I do have some lists that are set to private, for example my list of favorite people to follow. Not because I want to hide that from you all, but because I would hate for someone to have hurt feelings about not being on that list.

Another great feature of lists is that if you find someone on twitter and you would like to follow everyone on one of their lists, you can just simply click on that list and then subscribe to everyone on that list. It certainly saves a lot of time over clicking on each individual twitter profile and subscribing!  The one problem I have encountered is that if you are using the ipad/iphone twitter app when you follow a new tweep, you cannot add them to a list; you have to just wait until you're on a computer to do so.

Here is an explanation from the Twitter Help Center on how to use twitter lists to get you started.  Here's a youtube clip I found to show you how to get started. 

Daily 5 School-Wide Part 2

In my last post I shared with you an update on how we have gone school wide with the Daily 5/Cafe framework for teaching literacy.  Just how committed to this are we? Well, the reading basals are now officially boxed up and in storage!!

As we made the transition to going school-wide with Daily 5, I will tell you the first mistake I made as a principal...

During the Spring of 2011, I told all staff that we would be going school-wide with Daily 5 (almost all were familiar with it so it was no major shock) I told them that all they had to worry about was reading/learning how to implement the Daily 5 framework and that the following year we would add Cafe  to all classrooms.  Several teachers had already implemented both Daily 5/Cafe and several more also read the Cafe book to implement this past year as well.  So what was the mistake in holding off for the others?  Daily 5 is the framework for what your students are doing during the literacy block and provides the structure to build up their stamina to read/write for sustained periods of time.  Cafe is the acronym for the strategies you are teaching your students--both in whole group mini-lessons, small group mini-lessons and 1:1 conferring with students. While it is extremely important to have the routines/procedures in place, building up stamina just as "The Sisters" describe in the Daily 5 book, you need the Cafe strategies to teach!
So, there's my mistake. If you go school-wide, now you know not to make the same mistake I made!

If you are considering going school-wide with Daily 5/Cafe, here are some of the things we did in our building to help make this a successful transition:

• I created a video from our classrooms that were already using Daily 5/Cafe to share with our staff/school board.  
• Utilize the teachers that have already started and build on their success.  Let other teachers observe in their classrooms to see Daily 5/Cafe in action.  Look at their student reading growth in comparison to other classes--if you have enough data, look at the impact on those students after the summer as well (we're finding that since the kids enjoy reading books they choose, they're continuing to read over the summer and either maintaining or increasing their reading levels versus the "summer slide.") 
• Give all of your staff the Daily 5 and Cafe books.  Buy as many of their DVD's as you can too.  Use the books and DVD video clips for staff meetings/book clubs, discuss what you're learning and try applying in the classroom while learning (or if they're not comfortable that's when they can observe others that have already implemented). 
• Get memberships to The Daily Cafe website If you can't afford memberships, anyone can sign up for the weekly newsletters for free. 
• For the first 25 days of getting started, someone combined the Daily 5 and Cafe lessons into one simple document: Daily 5 and Cafe for Dummies, which you can find here (you'll just have to create/login to this message board to access it). 
• Throughout the school year, I tried to keep the focus of every staff meeting (actually, I call them Professional Learning Meetings) on Daily 5/Cafe. We used different video clips from the DVD's or the DailyCafe site for our continued professional learning/discussion.  As we started moving forward with 1:1 conferring, I even had a few brave teachers that let us share video clips of them conferring with teachers.  I also had a teacher allow me to video tape her giving a mock lesson and then in the video clip I put in funny thought bubbles like ("what was that strategy?", "what do the Sisters call it?" and "Thank goodness for the index") as she referred back to the Daily 5 book while teaching her students.  Aside from adding humor to our Professional Learning Meeting (which is always important) my purpose for that video clip was that we are all learning together and I don't expect anyone to be an expert. In fact, we are always learning and growing and if you have to refer back to your Daily 5 or Cafe book in the middle of a mini-lesson and then it is just showing students that you are a learner too. 
• Once I discovered the power of Pinterest, I started adding ideas I found for Daily 5/Cafe in Monday Memo's to staff.
• Invest in classroom libraries! If you're transitioning from a basal driven curriculum, chances are that your teachers' classroom libraries only contain what they have personally invested in them and you will need to flood your libraries with books for students to have a wide variety of books to select from.  Sounds easy, until you realize that $$$$ is involved.  Since we were cutting out the plethora of basal workbooks I moved that money in the budget to allow teachers to purchase books for classroom libraries.
• Most importantly, support your teachers in any way that you can.  Be it positive feedback, classroom coverage to observe others, time to meet with other teachers to discuss, etc.  If you have the opportunity to send any of your teachers to a workshop with the Sisters, do it!  One of our teachers had this opportunity (our first teacher to implement Daily 5/Cafe) .  We did send a team of 10 to see them at a conference, but the Sisters got stuck in a snow storm so we were really bummed out.  (My teachers keep asking if we can bring Gail and Joan to our school, but I keep telling them it's not likely going to happen!)

I would love to hear any other ideas/tips from teachers/admin on making the transition to Daily5/Cafe!

Rigor, Relevance and Relationships

I recently attended the 2012 Wisconsin School Leadership Academy and was fortunate to hear some great speakers that I will try to blog about in my next few posts (especially since I've been challenged to blog twice a week this summer --if you're counting this is blog post #2 in the challenge).  If you'd like to check out the tweets from this Academy, you can check #2012WSLA on twitter. I tweeted from the @AWSALeaders1 account, so you won't find too many tweets from me.

The first speaker we heard was Willard Daggett, known by many for speaking/writing about Rigor, Relevance and Relationships in education.  Here are some of my bullet point notes from his session:

• Schools are improving, but we still have a gap of where students need to be in our changing world.
• Teachers are on treadmills just trying to keep up and cover everything that might be on the test.
• The 3 central challenges in education right now: Common Core State Standards, Next Generation Assessments, and Teacher Evaluations.
• Rapidly improving schools have proactive leadership, and focused/sustained professional development. 
• Our state tests focus on lower level applications, but our students NEED higher level/real world applications (Rigor/Relevance).
• Research on the most improving schools have found that many have eliminated department chair heads and have instead moved to interdisciplinary teams. You cannot get to higher level/real world applications one discipline at a time!
• Building character/guiding principles (respect, responsibility, compassion, initiative, adaptability, perseverance, etc.) are still essential for our students.  Do you know anyone that truly lost a job due to a lack of academic skills? It was likely a lack of one of those character traits.
• There is NO research that supports eliminating the arts (especially if it means more test prep).

I realize that these are not the best notes from his session (like I said, I was also busy tweeting!)  I must confess that I have heard Daggett's name mentioned numerous times before, but didn't hop on the bandwagon to read up on the new "Rigor/Relevance" buzz words, but now I'm racking up another amazon order for his books.  Daggett doesn't speak to any sort of magic "be all/end all," but rather speaks about common sense practices and the importance of making your curriculum rigorous (higher level thinking/applications) and relevant (real-life situations that make the learning important and applicable for students).