It’s getting to be that time again…

Time to think about annual IEP reviews.  I know many teachers are still working on their GAA’s, but you need to be finishing those up and turning your sights on your next big thing which is IEP annual review season.

I don’t always agree with everything she posts, but Carol Sadler is definitely someone that is worth following on Facebook.  And she recently posted this:

Advocates Advice – We are quickly moving into “IEP Season”. Time to get your year end IEP meetings scheduled and on the books. Better to get scheduled in advance to make sure you have time to invite your help. Be sure to notify the school you will tape record the meeting and ask for a Draft copy of the IEP “that has been updated” with their proposed PLOP’s, accommodations and goals/objectives. Take the time to compare the Draft line by line to last year’s IEP to see what they changed and what they are proposing and make sure it is appropriate.

If you are a teacher and reading this, your hair might be turning a bit white or falling out.  Or you might be tempted to start pulling it out.  Let me tell you that what she is suggesting should be a matter of best practice for competent teachers.  Getting the meetings on the calendar early serves everyone well, and knowing who all is going to be attending will help secure a place that is big enough for everyone.

Tape recording the meeting (or using an mp3 recorder) is not a big deal.  If you are a teacher, bring your own to the meeting as well.  Both the parent and the district should be recording at the same time.  There is no presumption of privacy at these meetings, even though they are confidential.  You can’t podcast the meeting.  But by now teachers need to be getting used to being in the spotlight,  being recorded at any time, any where.  Transparency is our friend.  Stop being hostile to it, and open up your records, your mind, your intentions and your heart to the parents of the children you teach.  You might discover a wealth of rewards await you as the relationship transforms from confrontation to cooperation.

The idea of having a draft prepared a week ahead seems to always trip up teacher case managers. They can not seem to wrap their minds around the idea of moving their entire time table up one week.  You have to write this thing one way or another.  Stop the procrastinating and the excuse-making and just do it, and get it done.  You send it out a week or so ahead of time, with “DRAFT” written by hand in big letters, and attach a note “Please look over the enclosed proposed IEP DRAFT.  Please write down any concerns and/or suggested changes that you might have on the draft and send it back to me so I can include them and make sure they are acceptable to you before the meeting.”

Imagine an IEP that is less than an hour long, and everyone leaves the room smiling, and pleased and relaxed, feeling good about what just occurred.  If you have several annual reviews that are NOT like this then you should probably consider sending out your drafts well in advance so parents can look at them.  But aside from pleasing a parent, there are also other good reasons to move your time table up a week.  Remember you HAVE to write the thing regardless.  Why not do it well in advance when you can actually THINK about what you are writing instead of having that deadline looming over you?  You will discover that you make better choices and decisions when you are not rushed and pressured.  And if there are problems looming ahead, you have some time to begin addressing them before the meeting with the parents and the rest of the team.

I always did this as a matter of regular practice.  I always tried to get the draft done and out at least 4 days ahead of the meeting regardless of who the parent was.  If I get a parent making a request like Carol, guess what?  I move my time table up TWO weeks!  I want to swap IEP drafts, ideas and suggestions several times in advance of this meeting if at all possible.   If the parent is bringing an advocate, then I would rather the advocate look over my IEP, mark and bleed all over it with red ink and send it back however many times before the meeting, rather than rip me to shreds for hours in front of the rest of the team.  The advocate will have plenty of fodder for bloodletting at the meeting from other members of the IEP team but not me if I can do anything about it.

This is because the other members of my team balked at writing their portions in advance.  The occupational therapists, physical therapists and speech language pathologists have HUGE caseloads and I understand that.  BUT the workload is exactly the same whether you do it now or later.  I put all members of my team on notice as to the day the draft is going out.  It is up to them if they are ready or not, and 95% of the time, they failed to meet that deadline.

IEPs are exactly the same as alternate assessments that way.  If you procrastinate, you will end up under a huge backlog, and it will seem like a dark pit that you forever are trying to dig yourself out of as each deadline comes and overwhelms you.  You have got to get ahead and try to stay ahead.  Give yourself some wiggle room.  Waiting until the night before is a terrible choice that invites mistakes and trouble.

I actually attended one middle school meeting where everyone was there except the caseload manager.  When I asked the SLP where she was, I saw an eye roll and she whispered “She’s upstairs trying to write the IEP!”  This was a meeting that was already an hour late.  It was a good thing that parent was not paying Carol’s hourly rate!

Mightybell: PLN

Previously, a PLN was a “Professional” Learning Network: a somewhat fixed group of people that you join or are asked to join for your professional development. Now PLN is being used instead to indicate a “Personal” Learning Network: a very personal (individual) set of people you choose to follow or communicate with for your professional development, usually outside of any formal requirement.

Today’s Mightybell, like many of the other ones, consists of something that I have done somewhat naturally without necessarily doing it with the explicit purpose of building the network.  The main point of today’s exercise was using the RSS feed in order to subscribe to various blogs and websites, and then using some sort of service or tool to aggregate this information.  I actually do use both Google Reader and iGoogle to gather and organize my RSS feeds and information.  iGoogle is my tool of choice because the layout is more appealing and I can pick and choose what I want to read much easier.

I also use RSS to subscribe to various podcasts and use iTunes or another open source program like Banshee in order to subscribe to podcasts.  Podcasts are actually slightly better for me because I often find my reading time at a real premium.

In fact, te single biggest complaint or concern from fellow Mightybell travelers is pretty much the same: having too much information and sifting through it all.  I almost always get behind on all of my subscriptions and end up only reading or listening to a fraction of what I have coming in.  I’ll talk a little more about this overload in the next exercise, but it really is a concern even though I am not even using all of the tools available.  I have lots of interests, it is just a matter of managing them all!

For me there also has to be some balance between reading and writing.  Reading more makes me a better writer for sure, but I need to find a balance in order to continue to be part of the network and environment that I choose to participate in.  The two go together for me, so the PLN is a crucial piece.

The biggest weakness for me, at least at present, is how to leverage this network into something that has a more tangible benefit professionally.  I have interests and enjoy pursuing those through reading or writing.  But it is only recently that I have been concerned about these pursuits having some sort of monetary value.  I have always seen the reading and writing as a sort of sideline hobby, but it IS something I enjoy doing.  I still scratch my head when I consider that people would actually pay to read something that I write.  The Thinking Person’s Guide To Autism is at least a step in helping me see some potential in that direction.  But generally the biggest satisfaction for me is derived from helping other people  which is what I think underlies most of the content and people in my PLN.

 

 

 

Mightybell: Being Public Online

Today’s Mightybell deals with online behavior and possible obstacles to having a personal web presence.  One of the concepts mentioned was the idea of habits and attitudes, which was coined by Angela Maiers as “habitudes.”  So I wrote a brief comment on the Mightybell’s site and decided to post it here with a link or two and extend it a bit.

I have enjoyed contributing online and for the most part have enjoyed my fellow travellers.  The biggest hurdle I have faced, and still face, is administrators who are scared to death of content that they can not control.   Add a few stories like the ones about Ashley Payne and Dr. Talvatie-Siple and it  puts a real chill on social networking and sharing anything!  And this is where the habitudes kick in.

As content creators we have to own what we put out.  This takes a lot of courage.  When I was blogging anonymously, I was able to write much more honestly but I was not able to really help the people that mattered most to me.  Or help anyone outside of the blog.  So now I write with more sensitivity and more responsibly.  As an anonymous blogger I could hurl out ideas, even some very good ideas, but I didn’t take as much responsibility for what I was saying as I do today.

The best example of the worst sort of online habitutes cultivated by anonymity is Youtube comments.  Dial up any popular video and read the comments.  That sucking sound you hear is civility being being sucked out of the universe as people leave stupid and hateful comments.  And this happens as well in the blogging world,but for some reason Youtube had a bigger population of degenerate haters.  However, sometimes the feedback is brutally honest.  When I have posted a video that was kind of crappy, people did not hesitate to tell me exactly how crappy is was.

As a professional, I can’t afford that same level of honesty without being willing to back it up in some way.  But I am also more conscious of the person on the other side of the screen.  They had the courage to put something out there for others to see and comment and even if it isn’t the best, they did create something original.

And that is something that we need to do with our students; all of them.  Encourage some risk taking and creativity, while at the same time making sure that the feedback we offer is constructive and honest.

Personal Web Presence

Today’s Mightybell task involves thinking about a personal web presence.  Whether you want to admit it or not, you have a web presence.  Even if you have never posted a thing and eschew Facebook, Google+, Youtube or any other social networking site, you have a web presence.  That is because people are talking about you, may be posting pictures of you and organizations are going to be posting information about you.  The fact is, it is getting to be more and difficult to NOT have a web presence.  If you are a teacher, you have a web presence.  Your school posts your email and possibly other information about you so that parents can contact you.  Students may post pictures, video and information about you.  You’re out there, like it or not.

The Professional Association Georgia Educators (PAGE) have said, and are basically still saying, in regards to social media “Don’t Do It” or “If you have to do it, be professional.”    Not doing it is not an option today.  Even the school systems themselves have a presence on Facebook.

So a person needs to be aware of what is out there, and they need to manage their own online presence.  For instance I have been out there for quite a long time and have a fairly big internet footprint.  There is not a lot I can do about that because once it is out there, it is out there potentially forever.  But I can mak sure that my best stuff is on top.  That means having  Linkedin site that I am active with and gets updated and it is listed on Google.  That means posting useful information here on my blog.  And it might mean contributing meaningfully to other projects.

Students need to manage their personal web presence, because they are inevitably going to post or have things posted about them, that might not be professionally enhancing.  Things that seem like a good idea at the time later turn out to be pretty dumb.  But even the best and smartest can enhance their future goals and options by starting to manage their web presence and putting forth a positive image.  And that is what the management is about; managing your own brand instead of letting others do it for you.

 

The Internet and Learning

Today’s Mighty bell asks about the internet and learning.  That task is supposed to take 15 – 30 minutes.  I’ll probably spend more time on it…

• What sites do you go to regularly to learn new things?
• Are there authors or sites that you “follow?”
• When does the Internet or the Web help your learning, and when does it distract from good learning for you?
• How do you feel about technology and learning?

Where I go depends on what exactly I am learning about.  If I want just a general overview of something I have never heard of, I have no problems going to wikipedia.  I have no idea what a Higgs Boson particle is, so I can go there and learn something about it.  Easy, right?  But I might have never gotten curious enough to learn about it, if it wasn’t for a Youtube video about the subject.  And I discovered that video through this person’s main channel, which is just one of several Youtube channels I subscribe to because, well, because I’m a nerd!  The point of this being that even a distraction can lead to learning.

But the other side of it, is that the internet seems to be built for distraction.  For instance I start this blog post and start looking for Higgs Boson particles, and enter the world of Youtube, the mindless distractions are just a click away.  And it is SOOO easy to say “OH, this is only 2 minutes”…and an hour later I still haven’t finished this because I got lost in videos, Facebook and emails.  This was only supposed to be a 20 minute task!

I have an iGoogle with all of the news and interest sites in one place that I like to regularly read.  I have an education page and a technology page as well as a general news/weather/email/calendar page.   There is so much information, it is almost impossible to keep up with everything!  Another important tool in my internet arsenal is my podcast subscriptions.  I’m going to be on the road a couple hours per day, and the podcasts are a way to continue to learn while on-the-go.

I’ve made a conscious decision to kind of avoid Twitter for the moment, because I sometimes I feel as if I am already swimming in information as it is with blogs I can’t read, podcasts I haven’t gotten around to listening to and other things I have had to skim over.

To be sure the internet is an incredible resource for learning and teaching, and I’ve done my share of both through this blog, Teachertube and other resources.  I notice a lot of other teachers who have joined in and we are looking for ways to leverage this technology to better reach students.  One of the unique and interesting things about Mightybell is that you can support and cheer on colleague through comments or just clicking the “cheer” button which is more or less like a ‘like’ button on the Facebook.  And I notice that feature on my blog as well.  So I can imagine a time when students might be writing and producing content, posting it on the inernet using it as a sort of virtual refrigerator, and then everyone can view it and ‘like’ on it.  Now that seems a lot a lot more realistically motivating than grades or test scores.

Mightybell: (Re) Discovering Passions

If I’m not working, I need to be writing.  I suppose that is my first resolution of the new year.  I need to write more.  Of course, doing more reading will always produce better writing, so I suppose reading more is my second resolution of the year, although I’m less excited about that than the first one.

A few months ago, I signed up for MightyBell through the Future of Education group that I belong to.  And then I promptly forgot about it, until I started getting the daily email alerts, encouraging me to go on to the next step, which is to say, take the first step.  The initial idea of signing up what to have something blogworthy, thus it might get me writing again.

I know that I am not the only person who is feeling pretty dissatisfied with education and the direction it has been going the past 10 years.  In fact I have never talked to anyone who has anything to do with it, who is totally satisfied with the direction of our educational system.  But the online groups, Future of Education in particular, has at least kept me in the loop when I have otherwise wanted to run away from the education business. It’s still an awkward relationship, but I’m at least willing to give it another go.

Mightybell is simply a string of tasks that is done whenever you feel like it, with a daily email reminding you of what you need to do next.  For instance, step one is signing up for Teacher 2.0.  That was fairly easy, although it took a day to get approved.  The next task was thinking about and listing your talents, as well as thinking about how to recognize student talent.  I sort of breezed through that with teaching being a talent, some writing, dealing with and using technology and applied behavior analysis.  These are all things that when I think about, people either have recognized me for, or they are asking me about.  I was one of the technology nerds as a student and as a teacher, who people ran to when they were having trouble with their computer.

The next task was about passions.  Things I love doing and things I love learning about.  I was pretty stumped and decided I had enough for the day, right there.  Now there are a lot of things I like learning about.  Technology being a big one, along with U.S. History and science.  I like learning about the latest trends in gardening and becoming more self-sufficient.  I like learning about elves and hobbits.  But I don’t know if these are all passions.  I’m pretty sure my family would all agree that I am passoniate about my laptop as I spend most of my time on it.

But a follow-up question asks: Do I spend enough time on my passions?  Lately, the answer has been “no”.  Or at least not enough on where my passions and talents align.  And that is what I’m working through at the moment.  Discovering where my passions and talents align.  It occurred to me the best things that have happened to me in the past month WERE because of my writing right here on this blog.  It’s one of the rare places where the talents and passions seem to intersect.  Of course, the real trick is to get this intersection to pay the bills!

I had a poll once (the only one I’ve ever run here!) where I ask if this blog helps or hurts my chances of getting hired.  It occurs to me that if it hurts, than I might possibly be ill-suited for whatever that job is.  I do love teaching, and it still is a passion of mine.  In many ways, this blog has provided me a platform to do some good teaching.  And some good learning!

Passions and talents don’t need to be the same, but it certainly does make things easier if you can get the two together.

Task completed!

It’s Out!: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism

And it is on my list of things to get for myself, now that the holidays are all done and I am looking to get into some semblance of a routine again.

The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism is a collaborative effort that has brought together a lot of wonderful writers and experts.  It really is the book that I wish I would have had 11 years ago, when our oldest was first identified.  Over the years I had a chance to read a number of the other writers who were also blogging and writing on the subject and became contributers in this book.  We were all working our way through, trying to discover and put together the pieces that would make our lives better, more manageable and happier for everyone in our families.  This book represents the best of what we each discovered and is a field guide for anyone who is working their way through the novelties and oddities posed by autism.

The editors did a fine job of putting this together.  In particular, I want to give a shout to Liz, who has always been a source of encouragement and support to me and my writing.  Thanks so much for allowing me to be a part of such a great resource!