Survey says... Part 1

If you ever watched Family Feud growing up, you know that surveys can sometimes yield results that are accurate, while other times downright ridiculous or funny.



Asking the right question is super important to get the "right" response.

In my last post, I talked mostly about the main tech and logistical challenge of working -- or rather not working -- on the Project Book, and then went in-depth into the early stages of how the process went for the DOE guide.

I didn't say much about Project #3: The Getting Started Guide for teachers new to iEARN projects.

This task is quite different from the other two. Basically, it requires repurposing a lot of the media, documentation, and information that iEARN currently has in three main areas, and creating a succinct, "quick-and-dirty" guide to jumping into iEARN projects for teachers who've never done this kind of thing before. The iEARN teachers' community is, once you're in it, extremely welcoming, warm, helpful, open, generous, and supportive. However, getting started and finding your way into that community can seem intimidating to a teacher who has never done any kind of international collaboration, used web 2.0 technologies, or project-based learning. Those are three concepts that even on their own are sometimes tough for teachers to wrap their heads around; mesh them together and it can be enough to send a teacher away saying, "No thanks, I'll just keep doing what I've always been doing."

…. Which is exactly what we DON'T want!

Currently, iEARN's resources for getting started are in three main areas:

1. The aforementioned Project Book, on pages in the beginning of the book, before you get to the sections on all the various projects. This book is available in print and media formats.
2. A Multimedia Guide, available online and via CDROM (don't scoff -- many teachers in schools in developing countries don't yet have consistent and/or reliable internet access)
3. Notes and instructions about projects available online on the Building Connections section of the international iEARN website. 

Some countries have additional resources, but they're available only in that country's language, for the most part, and so would not be as accessible to me or the general audience of international iEARN teachers. There are also loads and loads of informal and anecdotal tips available for teachers on the internal message boards of the iEARN Collaboration Centre, but if you're totally new to iEARN, you might not even know where or how to access that.

My task: make all of this easier for teachers to understand.


Well, I never thought I'd say it, but I found myself digging out readings from my Ed Design course. Despite my having tossed the Smith & Ragan book on Instructional Design I bemoaned for so long (Word on the Street, are you listening?), I begrudgingly trawled through my annotations from that course and looked over all the stuff on Needs Assessment. Yep, that includes Tessmer and Rossett, too. If you were around when I was taking that course, you'll know that I grumbled about it more often than not. So, let this be testament that, like James Bond, I will never say never again. I once swore I'd never need Smith & Ragan, or any of that needs assessment stuff. Well, I was clearly wrong, as here I sat rifling through readings and annotations looking for where to begin.

You see, I thought I never needed that stuff because I am a teacher. Needs assessment? As my dear friend Sava says, "That's like, Learning 101." And as an "expert" teacher, I thought I knew all I needed to know about needs assessment. But what I didn't realize is that needs assessment in a classroom or formal learning situation is much different than in other situations, particularly those where the users are spread out geographically and by almost every other demographic possible -- language, age, ethnicity, experience, and so on. Not to mention that as a teacher, you spend time with your students; you KNOW them. When you're doing instructional design, you often don't know them at all. So you have to ask questions.

And so here was itty bitty insight #293487: I like teaching better than instructional design. In ID, the relationship with the learner is less important. You're one step removed from it because you're designing something to help someone learn, rather than being directly involved with the process of learning. This is an important bit of insight for me, although not surprising, as I had suspected as much when I was actually taking the aforementioned Ed Design course. But anyway, my point is that I realized that when doing any kind of ID, needs assessment takes a completely different approach than teaching because it's not as social and directly interactive as the relationship between teacher-student.

So, what did I do next?

• I talked to the tech people at iEARN and got analytics history for everything on the Multimedia Guide and the Building Connections section of the iEARN.org site in the previous month
• I put together a survey to send out to current iEARN teachers, asking them for feedback about all the different media available for getting started.

2 ways to do everything by D'Arcy Norman
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… and that survey was way harder than I was expecting! "Oh, I'll do a survey!" I thought. Easy peasy. Yeah, notsomuch. After reading all those Ed Design papers again, I realized that creating the right kind of survey was going to be much more complicated than originally thought. The types of questions needed to be just right. There needed to be a balance between those types of questions. I needed to gauge feelings as well as competency. I needed ratings and open-ended suggestions. And, my users all spoke different languages as their mother tongue. Egads - if anyone took this survey it was going to be a miracle!

Eventually I got it done and Lisa agreed to send it out in the next iEARN newsletter, as well as posting it on the forums. I spent a good chunk of time monitoring the forums and piping in here and there to get a feel for how teachers used them as a resource for getting started. I made notes, lots of notes. I went through everything in the Project Book, the Multimedia Guide, and the Building Connections page and made more notes.

And then I waited.

It took 2 weeks, but we finally got enough responses for me to do something with! I was hoping for a minimum of 25 responses. We got 27. That was enough, as far as I was concerned. It was June -- the end of the school year for many teachers, and teachers are crazy BUSY at that time of year; I know this from experience. Luckily, the respondents were also a very good cross-section of the iEARN teacher population -- from 12 different countries and all with varying levels of experience in iEARN projects -- so this meant the sample would be at least semi-accurate. I mean, this isn't a scientific survey or anything! But we did need something that would at least give us enough data to get a pulse on what people thought of the current available resources for getting started in iEARN projects.

The next steps would be aggregating all this data and presenting it in some way that would inform me as to HOW to do this new getting started guide, and WHAT to put into it. Does that sound daunting to you? It didn't to me.

Not at first. But that's because I hadn't seen the responses yet.

by dno1967
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Jumping In

simplicity is hard by Will Lion
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One of my initial challenges when I began at iEARN was that I wasn't really sure who to go to for what. I mean, it's not that complicated: the iEARN office is quite small, with only about 12-14 full-time staff. But I was working on 3 different projects, with somewhat different goals, and in different "branches" of iEARN. It was clear that Lisa was my immediate supervisor, but when I asked her about things regarding the Dept of Ed guide (herein known as the DOE guide), she would politely listen and then suggest that I should ask Diane Midness, who is in charge of professional development. (I much later learned that this is Lisa's very polite style -- she would never tell me that I was way off base and asking the wrong person, and I appreciate this so much!) Eventually I figured out that for the Project Book, I should be talking to Lisa, for the DOE guide I should talk to Diane, and for the Teacher's Guide (for teachers new to iEARN), I should talk to both of them. Got it.

Lisa gave me the current year's Project Book both on CD and hard copy as well as a version of Adobe InDesign to take home and install on my computer (last year's MacBook Pro) so that I could familiarize myself with the program before it came time to use it to put together the Project Book.

The only problem was, the version of Adobe InDesign they had was version CS2. Yeah, from 2005. Eep. And while it was running fine on the Mac mini at my iEARN desk, it wouldn't even install on my MacBook Pro at home. After trying two different install copies and 3 times with each one, I finally gave up. I spent a bit of time trying to wrap my head around it at the office, but being so outdated, it was difficult to find online tutorials. It was going to be crazy difficult to learn this piece of software if I didn't have the opportunity to play with it at home. I explained this all to Lisa, who listened attentively and soon thereafter, contacted TechSoup to see if iEARN could get the new CS5 anytime soon. In the meantime, Lisa told me to focus on the other projects. Having plenty of other stuff to work on, I gladly changed gears.

I focused my attention on the DOE guide at first. Diane and I met briefly to talk about what its goals are (and were) and how it has changed so much since its initial inception. From what I understand, the DOE Teacher's Guide was originally conceived at some time during the Clinton Administration (I don't know the exact year), and then was updated one or two times during the Bush Administration, but then was shelved for some time. Now, under Secretary Duncan's Education leadership, the DOE was asking iEARN to dust it off and make it relevant, mostly because of Obama and Duncan's push for international engagement through education, and to make education more connected through technology. (Side note: Karen Cator used to be on iEARN's board, so iEARN was very happy when she was promoted to the government position she is in now, and the DOE is likewise very happy that iEARN is continuing their long relationship with the DOE. Some may feel this is a conflict of interest, but most would look at the long history of the relationship between the State Department and iEARN and conclude that they have always had, and will continue to have, a very strong relationship over the past 20+ years, despite who's sitting in the Oval Office.)

Anyway, Diane asked me to take a critical look at the DOE Guide as it currently was, and to come back to her and Ed Gragert, iEARN's director, with some ideas. I did. First I printed it out (54 pages!) and made some general highlights here and there, with some question marks in the margins, etc. Then I got online and looked at it in all its bare HTML glory. Hmmm. It wasn't so exciting. Over the course of the next few days, I annotated every page using Diigo (if you're a Diigo user and signed in, when you visit any of those pages, you will see my notes there). Surprisingly, I also made notes on the printed-out version. I say "surprisingly" because it even surprised myself how much I wanted to physically write on paper; I eventually needed a whole physical file folder to keep track of all my sticky notes on the hard copy printout. My process was very organic and very back-and-forth, and it took longer than I had expected. Of course, I was checking EVERY link to see if it still worked, and I'd estimate that about 75% of them did not. Of the ones that did work, half of them linked to pages that looked like they were no longer being used. It became apparent that most of the current guide was going to need to change, and that a significant amount of research was going to be needed. Additionally, I was going to need to contact people in charge of projects listed there, as well as people who were just starting projects of their own.

My head was swimming with all the avenues that were going to need exploring. I couldn't stop thinking about all the educators in my Twitter stream who would routinely tweet things like, "I'm starting a project with my 6th graders on the China - anyone from China out there who would like to Skype in?" and so forth. I started collecting lists of websites and networks where educators like these hung out (note: it feels very strange to talk about "educators like these" in the 3rd person, because I was one of those educators not so long ago!). More on these resources later.

Eventually I had an armoury of general sites and resources, but I knew I was going to need a methodical way of working through them all at some point. I was a bit overwhelmed thinking about just how much research there was to do, people to contact, ideas to organize, etc. I knew, however, that before I could start putting ideas "down" on paper, I needed to know some parameters.

• who was the audience? international or only American teachers?
• how would these pages be coded? regular HTML?
• were we allowed to insert video and images? (the current pages, as you probably noticed are mostly text, and VERY… vanilla, for lack of a better word)
• what was the deadline?

Before I could even ask Diane these questions, Ed informed me that there was going be a scheduled conference call about this very thing. I attended the conference call with Ed and several people from the DOE office. It was my first ever conference call of that kind, and it was very confusing. Not only could I not tell who was speaking at what time, it seemed that the people at the DOE were not really certain about what they wanted -- I got the sense that they were very busy --  and had really just hoped that we at iEARN would take care of everything. Which was fine -- this is, I think, what Ed and Diane wanted anyway, as autonomy is easier -- except that they (the DOE) had very strict requirements about how to go about the actual page construction.

Witness: The finished product would need to be sent as files in Microsoft Word. Yes, that's right, you read correctly. Microsoft Word.

I suddenly felt like I was creating a webpage back in 1998.

Here is a general overview of the steps I was asked to take: (edited for clarity and anonymity)

• Download HTML files from http://www2.ed.gov/teachers/how/tech/international/index.html and put the content in Word.  
• Write and finish the new document (in Word).
• Send to R*** for clearance.
• Get and make edits (from clearance process) in Word file.
• Make sure Word file is final.
• Mark up final Word file in one big HTML file, keeping markup simple.  See our style guide pages at http://www2.ed.gov/internal/styleguide/markup.html and http://www2.ed.gov/internal/styleguide/css.html for general guidance on markup style.
• Send final HTML file to R***.  R*** will send to K**** and J**.  
• We (someone on our team) will break the big file into smaller files and post.  (A table of contents page will be generated here.)
• After it’s posted live, we will send the collection of individual files (page) to Ed.
• Whenever a file needs to be updated/edited, Ed’s team can make the edits in the relevant file (that we sent after posting) and send to us to replace that particular file on the web.

So, you can see that this process was going to be rather slow. Visits to those two style guide pages (above) made me blink twice and rub my eyes. Yowza. I met again with Diane and we discussed what the best way would be to go about creating these files so that multiple people had access and could contribute and comment. GoogleDocs was discussed as an option, but because it doesn't always play well with formatting when switching to Word, we opted not to use that. Instead, we created separate Word Documents for each section of the guide and put them on the internal iEARN server. This way we could all access them, but it did still mean that only one of us could edit at a time. I was going to be doing most of the editing anyway, with Ed, Diane, and Lisa providing feedback, so this wasn't a huge problem. I also introduced Diane and Ed to Diigo so they could see the comments I had already made on all the DOE pages. Within minutes, Ed and Diane had already gone into the Word documents and left notes and tips for me about things to explore, remove, or people to contact.

We were underway and I was ready to jump in.

Summer in Redgranite by Just Add Light
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May I?

When I last left you, I was basically lamenting (okay, making excuses) about why I've been so delayed in creating this blog. I'm done with that now; I've settled into the fact that I'm behind and I just need to get a move on.

So, let's start with May.

I began my internship at iEARN on May 24 -- near the end of the month. Actually, my internship beginning was not so "simple" as this. I should give a bit of the backstory so you know where I'm coming from. First of all, I had been warned in advance that finding an internship in the summer could be painfully competitive. I'm generally not a competitive person at all, so I'll admit this made me wince. I mean, I'm not competitive, but while I bemoaned the possibility of it being competitive, there was another part of me -- that part of me that remembers that I'm 35 -- that said, "Wait a sec. Competition? You've got it nailed. You're a teacher. You can do anything." It's true, folks. If you are (or have been) a teacher, you know exactly what I'm talking about. After accompanying 70 sixth-graders on jungle hikes in the Vietnamese rain forest for a week, someone's gonna tell me I'll have a hard time getting an internship?! Eff that! (Apologies for the language -- but I'm trying to recreate the scene here, and that is exactly what went through my head.) So I didn't pay much heed to that warning, needless to say.

And it's a good thing I didn't.

Choices by garlandcannon
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Not only did I get an internship, I had plenty to choose from. I interviewed at some fantastic places and left all of them with the sense that there is really some amazing, inspirational, GOOD work happening in NYC with media and learning. GlobalKids, Urban Arts Partnership, Mouse, TaskStream, and Vision Education and Media all gave me interviews and plenty to think about. Really, there is truly some excellent stuff happening with these organizations; if you're in technology, media, and learning, I urge you to check them out. At one point I even considered merging internships with two different organizations just to get some exposure to different kinds of things. This still sounds like a great idea to me, but my reality is that life is too busy.

So, I interviewed with all of these organizations and met some fabulous people, and was offered something within each of them. I eventually settled on iEARN for several reasons:

1. I had known about the organization before, having seen them at conferences and/or heard about them through colleagues.
2. They are involved with international education, something near and dear to my heart.
3. One of the women to interview me, Tina Habib, knows and has worked with another friend of mine in Qatar -- we didn't discover this until the interview, and it was a lovely surprise, as the mutual friend is someone I love very much (kaif halak, habibi? if you're reading this, Anwar!)
4. I love that iEARN's backbone is built on project-based learning collaborations across continents. This is something that excites me very much and is something I know about, so the idea of working more within this context but not as a teacher was greatly exciting to me.

While the opportunities at other organizations were equally as exciting, a handful would have taken me a bit too far out of my comfort zone, and a couple involved doing things that, while fascinating, would have taken me down a career path I'm not sure I'd be interested in. They were definitely interesting, but not all were where my passions are.

iEARN graciously and excitedly made space for me, and starting on May 24th I began working each Monday and Wednesday.

A brief background on iEARN. iEARN is an acronym which stands for International Educator and Resource Network. It's been around since 1988, so it has an established history, community, and directive. There are actually many iEARNs. What I mean by that is that there is iEARN international -- an international network of teachers and students -- and then there is an iEARN-USA. And an iEARN Pakistan. And an iEARN Canada. You get the picture. In some countries there is lots of representation and some of those countries have iEARN coordinators and more. In other countries, there might just be one or two teachers in different schools who want to participate. And of course there is everything in between. iEARN international is not centralized; each country finds its own funding, and runs itself. Having said that, iEARN-USA is one of the best-funded of all the iEARNs, so things like the iEARN international website and their collaboration centre are run here in the USA offices. iEARN-USA is a non-profit, tax-exempt organization that runs many different projects and programs. As I mentioned earlier, the backbone of iEARN is their project-based learning collaborations. Basically, iEARN facilitates international collaboration through project-based learning, allowing teachers and their students in one country to connect and work with teachers and students in another country on a common project. All of this is done via different kinds of technology and media. It's really the "meat and potatoes" of what iEARN is all about, and why their current motto is "Learn WITH the world, not just about it." However, iEARN also facilitates and runs other programs such as international exchange programs, such as NSLI and YES. They even do teacher exchanges such as the Fulbright Teacher Exchange. An additional arm of iEARN is their involvement with other partners such as Adobe Youth Voices and PEARL World Youth News. Lastly, iEARN does tons of professional development for teachers interested in any aspect of international learning, collaborative project-based learning, cultural exchange, technology and digital media in learning, and more. Professional development is offered in face-to-face at workshops and conferences around the world, and in online virtual environments as well. As you can see, this small non-profit delivers on many different fronts!

From the beginning, Lisa Jobson, the Assistant Director of iEARN-USA, had arranged three projects that I would be working on for the duration of the summer. I'm copying and pasting their descriptions here:

1) Update the Teachers Guide to Global Collaboration on the Internet with current tools and resources. (The Teachers Guide was originally developed by iEARN for U.S. Department of Education)
Research tools and resources for integrating online international exchange into the classroom

2) Produce 2010-2011 iEARN Project Book
Outreach to iEARN educators worldwide to get new projects and project updates for the 2010-2011 iEARN Project Book, and edit book in Adobe InDesign. (See the 2009-10 Project Book.) 

3) Create an iEARN Starter Kit/Handbook as a companion to the iEARN Project Book.  Drawing from DOE Teacher’s Guide research, and earlier issues of the iEARN Project Book, develop a short online guide with tips, tools, resources, and case studies of successful classrooms internationally that help to answer the question often asked by teachers when they join iEARN – “How do I get started?”

And a general description of the mentoring I'd receive:

Adrienne will work closely with a number of staff, including Lisa Jobson, Diane Midness, and Ed Gragert.  All three projects that Adrienne will be involved in have built-in opportunities to exchange drafts and get peer feedback.  iEARN-USA is a small office (roughly 14 full time staff) that places a high emphasis on collaboration , so while Adrienne will be serving in a lead role in all 3 projects, we’ll meet regularly to exchange ideas and drafts, and distribute work.

wetfeet by intheozone
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I remember being extremely excited when I was handed these projects -- all three involved areas I wanted to know more about or be more involved in. I was looking forward to getting my feet wet!

I didn't realize at the time just how ginormous these projects would become. Ah, the 20/20 vision of hindsight, huh? :)

At any rate, the end of May was a busy time for me because I was just beginning these new roles at iEARN and I was also finishing up a summer course back on campus (Leadership for School Improvement). I barely had time to figure out what I was doing next, but eventually I settled into the swing of things at iEARN, and figured out who to talk to about which project, and where to begin on each of them (spoiler alert: some didn't need beginning just yet).