This phenomenon, although real and slightly annoying, is not what I want to concentrate on. I don’t want to plumb the depths of why it is that people around the world will comment on your blog and give you feedback on your work, but it is maddening to just get a coworker to check out a great resource. I’m not interested in figuring out why the parents of your students are less inspired than the parents of other teachers’ students. In fact, I really don’t care that the recognition for doing online presentations and creating learning objects that are widely held as groundbreaking is seen in local circles as an affront to the organization from which you hail.

All hyperbole aside, what I would like to focus on is creating collaborative opportunities in your “own town.” How can we go about making sure that the great types of conversation and feedback described above are going on in the hallways in between classes?

Well, I think I have come up with three things that will help:

1. Wear your passion on your sleeve.
2. Reach out on a consistent basis.
3. Find a way to incorporate what others are doing already into your vision.

I have been e-mailing quite a bit about my podcast on this topic. There are a few teachers out there that are wrestling with the use of technology in their teaching. One such teacher, Jason Hando, said that he worked with a “flat world” project initially without applying all of the technology. After he had worn his passion on his sleeve for a while, he applied some web 2.0 technology in the form of a blog and received positive feedback from his school administration, including his principal.

This is not the only kind of passion that I think we can wear on our sleeve. We can be constantly talking about the great resources that we have found in our feed readers. We can be showing off the authentic products that our students are creating daily. Eventually other teachers will start to ask us how we are doing this. We can let our students and their parents become the advocates for the kind of learning experiences that are abundant in our classrooms. They will start wearing our passion on their sleeves too.

We should also be sending feelers out every once in a while for anyone who is ready to incorporate School 2.0, even to the smallest degree. Hold a class on blogging in the classroom even if you know only 5 people will show up. Send an e-mail tell others what you are doing that you know will only be read and trashed by the majority of your staff. Pull other people into a project that you are working on if they are on the outside looking in at your technology realization. Be the one teacher that “gets it,” but isn’t angry that others don’t.

The last thing that I have found for working collaboration with the people around you into your hectic global collaboration schedule is to honor what the teachers in your school are already doing. I am a big fan of looking at a project that is already in place and just making it 2.0. A great example of this was when my team decided that we were going to go on a field trip to Denver. Most of the other teams in the school were having the kids to a scavenger hunt of key places in the downtown area and answering questions on a sheet of paper, which was to be turned in and never to be heard from again. My way of making this trip into a “2.0″ experience was to use Mapwing so that my students could make interactive tours of downtown which could be looked at by anyone from around the world to find out more about our fine city.

Each teacher on our team was able to contribute their expertise to the project, but we were showing the kids how to collaborate and create in an authentic way. My hope is that more of these types of cross-curriculum projects start to happen organically because we have opened up the door by using what was already in existence.

What do you think? Are there other ways to create collaboration in our own towns and become, if not prophets, at least teachers with advice and experience worth sharing?

When I try to explain to people, even the most highly educated and interested people, what I am doing in my classroom, I get two distinct reactions.

1. This is way too technical for me. It is fine if you want to try it out (and fall flat on your face when parent/administration/other teachers find out what you are up to), but I am just fine to live in oblivion. Wikis (did I say that right?) are too complicated for my kids. There is no way that they would be able to handle that kind of organization on their own. Your kids are different. You have more access to the technology. You were born into this stuff. I am too far into my career to start learning something new.

2. We tried something like this back in the 70’s/80’s/90’s/a few years ago. It didn’t really work then, but feel free to give it a try now. I was pretty excited about it before, but I think my interest petered out around when I realized that I was doing more of the work than the kids were. I think there are a few teachers in the school down the road who are doing this kind of stuff, so I’m not really sure that it is new or different. I will just sit back and watch you put effort into collaborative tools, but I will not put my own support behind it.

Now, #1 I have made my peace with. If a teacher has decided that they are not ready to try something new yet, I will reframe it as many different ways as I can think of in order to get them on board. At least they accept that working with students around the world, getting instant feedback on authentic writing, and infinite choice in assignments are things that are truly different than the traditional goings on of education.

#2, on the other hand, does not even acknowledge that working with web 2.0 tools is something that is a transformational step. They are so used to educational jargon and methods being repackaged and renamed that they have come to believe that School 2.0 is just a big facade that houses the likes of Project Based Learning or Cooperative Learning Groups. I can’t blame them for thinking this in the light of all that public education has taught them, but for them not to be able to see the drastic difference between writing an essay to one teacher and writing an essay to an entire school (and beyond) to be critiqued and linked to and built upon is something that I just will never understand.

Case in Point: After presenting The Academy of Discovery to a high-level technology coordinator in DCSD, he said that there were pockets of people who were trying this out elsewhere in the district. I was shocked. It was news to me that we just might have the most progressive district in the US and I just don’t know about it. Or, perhaps the problem is that he is having trouble distinguishing between an authentic collaborative student-directed wiki (receiving 50,000 hits in 6 weeks) and doing iSearches with google in order to make posters to put up in the room. Perhaps this is an exaggeration, but I really think that this is an important roadblock to advancing our vision of education. Many educators, administrators, and parents believe that all technology integration is created equal. This is just simply not the case.

So, I guess what I am saying is this: We need something that will distinguish us from mundane “technology in the classroom.” We need to be seen as going beyond what has been done before, not something that is untested or fad-like, but rather something that is essential. How do we make sure that people get that we are not doing something old in a new way? We are doing something new, something that you would never be able to do without the tools of online collaboration and rss.

This is a challenge that I am willing to take up because if we can’t even explain what is going on in our classroom to other educators so that they realize the potential of a school 2.0 environment, we will never be able to explain it to the rest of the world.