The Journey to Becoming 21st Century Educators (Part 2 of 4): Lindsay

{by Gail Tolbert}

This is my second of 4 blogs about many of my friends and connections who are educators, educators at different stages in their career, educators wanting to become 21st Century Educators (Read the first one here). Since I, too, have been a teacher and a principal, they share their stories, their success and their trials with me. As a past educator, I can relate to these stories and have lived similar things. I cherish their journeys and new learning, and hold these educators in high regard. I appreciate and respect that every day they enter their classrooms to educate and teach our children and give 100% of themselves in the process. I want to share some of their stories, their thoughts and lessons and some solutions to their questions with you. Here's Lindsay:

Lindsay has been an elementary teacher for four years. She, too, grew up with technology and is looking for more ways to incorporate technology in managing her work, especially within the curriculum she teaches. Lindsay has learned that having a viable and accessible curriculum is of utmost importance to educators and she has been thinking about her “viable and accessible” district curriculum; it is stored in binders in the principal’s office and the district’s G drive. She can access the curriculum at work through the district network but the curriculum is old and outdated and it is not easy to search or find the information for which she is looking. She has really given up on this useless tool and does not have access to the current district curriculum as she prepares her units and daily lessons.

Lindsay is also on the curriculum writing committee for her grade level. She says the meetings are miserable because there is no process or tools for updating, editing, rewriting and managing the curriculum. Lindsay says the team has discussed how nice it would be to have a curriculum management system. Teachers could edit, update, share and collaborate with others. In addition, they could align their units and their lesson plans to the state standard and the new common core standards and have reporting capabilities about the curriculum and standards. She says they do have a document that is used as a pacing guide; but every time they make a change, they must remember to go in and update that pacing guide, distribute it, and then hope the new version is used. These tasks are all so laborious it is hard to keep up with these committee tasks as well as everything she needs to do for her classroom.

The Journey to Becoming 21st Century Educators (Part 1 of 4)

{by Gail Tolbert}

This is my first of 4 blogs about many of my friends and connections who are educators, educators at different stages in their career, educators wanting to become 21st Century Educators. Since I, too, have been a teacher and a principal, they share their stories, their success and their trials with me. As a past educator, I can relate to these stories and have lived similar things. I cherish their journeys and new learning, and hold these educators in high regard. I appreciate and respect that every day they enter their classrooms to educate and teach our children and give 100% of themselves in the process. I want to share some of their stories, their thoughts and lessons and some solutions to their questions with you. Here is the first story about Christy:

Christy is a teacher in training; she is in college studying to be an elementary teacher. Christy grew up with the web, phone, games, Twitter, YouTube, texting and all the other technology. She attends a large, progressive University in the Midwest and is in the midst of her education internships in local schools. She is preparing for real-world teaching. Christy has had one class on educational technology in which she learned about NETS-T and NETS-S. She also learned about Smart Boards and their benefits to teachers and students.

Since Christy is so tech savvy, she has been thinking about how she can communicate with students, peers and parents over the web. She wants to express herself, her style, and her brand using all the tools with which she is comfortable. Anytime she needs information, she goes directly to the web; so she wants the web to be her primary source of disseminating communication and information. She wants to quickly add weekly notes, class newsletters, lunch menus, spelling words, homework assignments, grading rubrics and class schedules. She is concerned about how she will accomplish these tasks easily and in a short period of time. She is wondering if there is a place or tool that will help her and give her access to blogs, Twitter, YouTube, etc. Christy has not yet learned about the leading edge content management tools that will enable her to reach this technology goal.

YSU SMASHUP Launch - The First of Four University-Wide SMASHUPs to Launch

Today is the day! Today marks the launch of the Youngstown State University SMASHUP, the first of four university-wide SMASHUP Beta projects that will launch over the next few weeks.


You may view the SMASHUP website at http://web.ysu.edu/smashup/home.

YSU’s SMASHUP site will help increase interaction between the university and current, past and future students and other stakeholders, bring more attention on their university, and catapult them into a leadership position in university social media, said Ross Morrone, YSU's web developer and creative director for new media.

"With so many options out there when it comes to Social Media, it seems redundant to post the same tweet or status over and over. You also need to understand that with so many departments we have several Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube accounts." Morrone said.

"Mashups will allow our users to go to one place a read all university tweets, watch our newest YouTube videos and connect with us on Facebook. It doesn't get much easier or cooler than that."

AllofE Solutions worked to design, code, implement and analyze YSU's social media initiatives to create a customized solution to increase the effectiveness of YSU's social media.

Looking forward, AllofE will be launching three other SMASHUPs for DePaul University, Northern Illinois University and Our Lady of the Lake University over the next few weeks.

For more information about the SMASHUP project, please contact Katie Brosious at kbrosious@allofe.com.

Higher Education and Social Media Mashups

Mashup: a Web page or application that uses and combines data, presentation or functionality from two or more sources to create new services (See the Wikipedia article).

Put an emphasis on the social media and out comes the SMASHUP. To us, that means: a branded, customized, and high-end social media site to aggregate all of a university social media activity and accounts into one well-designed central hub.

Its main purpose is content aggregation and social media integration. It displays actual feeds on the site - not just a list of 20 Twitter accounts, 30 Facebook pages, 10 blogs, etc. It keeps users on your site longer, and gives them what they want in a way that forces them to do less work to get there.

A SMASHUP streamlines a university's social media accounts, is more user-friendly and best of all, it sets your university apart. It's completely branded to fit with the university's brand. It's fluid and it's always current. You're already tweeting, facebooking, blogging, YouTube-ing, etc., so why not make those accounts more effective? Why not make it easier for yourself to put it in front of your audience, students, alumni?

Read tweets without going to Twitter. Check out Facebook updates without going to Facebook. Watch YouTube videos without going to YouTube. Look at Flickr photos without going to Flickr. That's what a SMASHUP does. It aggregates everything and puts it in front of your audience. You're already updating these accounts frequently. A mashup makes the deployment easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be launching four university-wide SMASHUPs. We're really excited about it. And you should be too. Stay tuned!

You Have a New Friend Request...

As a recent addition to the AllofE team, I thought I'd introduce myself. My name is Rachel and I am in my first year of a PhD program at the University of Kansas in Rhetoric & Composition. This past year I received my undergraduate degrees in English & Spanish and I hope to teach at a University in the future.

I know it sounds like a different profile than you might have expected of a person writing to you from AllofE, but I am confident that my personal style and varied interests bring something unique to the already exciting direction we're going right now.

And, well the truth is, I feel that I am a lot like the people AllofE Solutions works with, so let's connect! This past year I made a promise to myself that I would actively seek out knowledge about social media, technology, and ways to be a better connected teacher in the future. When I found the opportunity to work with AllofE Solutions and continue working toward my graduate degree, I knew it was the perfect fit. I represent many of the people directly affected and influenced by ContentM systems, higher education, and of course, social media. I want to learn outside of the classroom over the next few years and stay ahead of my colleagues. I hope ultimately I'll be more marketable as a teacher and socially connected as a person with this knowledge and experience that is necessary for success today in the U.S. I want to be connected: with other teachers, administrators, and most of all - my students.

Who am I?
I am a student. My weekly agenda, both academic and social, are run by these systems - I communicate, receive information, research, and spend every day working with social media and higher education curriculum management systems.
I am a future teacher. As early as next year I will be teaching my own classes, and as late as five years from now, I will be done taking classes and ready to be a full-time teacher. I need to know what is going on with these systems, how easily accessible they are to teachers, and how I can keep up with technology at the pace my students will be in their lives.
I research Language and Writing. Just last week, the professor of one of my classes stated that technology is changing the way language works in society, and the current generation (oh, that's me...and you!) needs to evolve with it in order to understand and work with it in the future. I'm here to keep evolving with this language. Too many times I have heard teachers concerned about holding onto the way they learned about language & books, assuming they cannot keep up with the changes in technology today. Why not learn how to "keep up" with it and use it to my advantage? If my students write differently because they communicate more via Twitter, Facebook, and texting, I won't turn my nose up and act as if it's not legitimate, because most likely it's the most legitimate language in their lives! I want to study and collaborate with them to see what writing can and will be in the future.
I am an alumna. Not only have I now entered a huge network of graduates from undergrad, I am also an alumna of a sorority, service fraternity, and a number of other social networks. Why wouldn't I want to keep up with those people, learn from others who have been out of school longer than me, and know how to utilize social media to connect in ways my parents couldn't have even imagined when they graduated from the same school almost 30 years before? That's just exciting. I can keep in touch with friends, connect with new colleagues, and continue to expand my social "network" exponentially each year.

So here I am. I love to write, I love challenges, and I love connecting with others. You may hear from me quite a bit about the exciting things that we have going on here at AllofE: about what I'm learning and how we can connect and evolve together. Survival of the fittest isn't so threatening when you know there are people like AllofE to make sure you come out on top.