 I'm Holly Clark and we're here to talk about edgy slam ideas for crowd sourcing your professional development. I'm Holly from San Diego and I would like my other panelists to introduce themselves. Hi, I'm David Tarrio. I'm David Tarrio from Coastal Mesa. I teach at Found Valley High School and I also blog at TheWrightinessesAll.com. I teach high school English and I'm really excited to be here. I've seen Holly and Tanya. Some people would maybe say too often but for me it's never enough. Hi everyone. My name is Jenny Magara and I am the digital learning coordinator for a network of 29 Chicago public schools called the Academy for Urban School Leadership. I'm also a big Tanya and Holly fan and also a David fan so this is fun to be on. Thanks guys. And I'm Tanya Avril and I co-host with Holly the edgy slam.me show. I'm a lead teacher for a school board in Montreal for educational technology and digital citizenship and really excited to be here. Let's get going. So Tanya, can you start by telling us what's edgy slam and why we decided to use crowd sourcing. So an edgy slam, we came up with the idea for edgy slam around January of last year and the idea came from us sort of being, you know, listening to all of the things that were going on with our networks on Twitter and on Google plus and you know meeting people in conferences and then getting these really great ideas from them and we said wouldn't it be a great idea if we could share those ideas but really like quickly because I don't have much time. I don't know about you guys but I want to know like a good idea. I want to be able to use it something I can use tomorrow in my classroom or share with my teachers in a short video and give them some ideas. So that's sort of where edgy slam came from and the idea of a slam is something that like you know if you've gone to most conferences have slam sessions and we kind of said imagine we could like bottle those slam sessions and some hangouts and you know share them with the world. So that's essentially where the idea came from. In terms of why, well I mean our network is the best network you could ever imagine, right? Right guys? So we had, you know, we knew we had the people. We just had to get a way of bottling in in one place that people knew they could go and visit and then using social media was the easiest way to get it out. So that's essentially where it all came from. And back when I started teaching I could have never imagined knowing David or Jenny because there was no Twitter, there was no video conferencing and as I met all three of you I'm able to keep this friendship going because of Twitter and video conferencing. Something that wasn't available to me when I first started teaching so this is really exciting. So I'll put it out there. I have a question for you guys. Why do you find the, like how do you guys use crowdsourcing for your professional learning? Jen, you want to get started? Yeah so there's a lot of different ways that we do it both virtually and in person. So one example is recently we started a new conference called Play Date which is people learning and asking why digital age teacher exploration which is also the world's longest acronym. But the idea was hands-on learning. Even more than an Ed conference the entire thing was workshop style with no leader and because there was no leader in the, in each of these learning spaces we needed to have some sort of direction. So we didn't want to just throw 20 people into room and say here's final cut pro good luck see you in an hour and shut the door which is actually what we did we wanted them to have some sort of guiding resource to go with but we didn't want to say alright David's an extra final throw him in there for two reasons one a lot of times with the exception of the most skilled leaders it turns into sitting and getting to David doesn't get to learn and I think many people experience that they go to conferences and they spend the entire time sharing and teaching and they don't get to be a learner. So instead what we did was we started we created Google Doc templates for all of these tools that people voted that they wanted to learn and then sent them out over Twitter Google plus Facebook and said hey everybody take two minutes throw in one link one tip about this resource if you are going to say one tweet about how to use it or one tip do it and then people filled it out and then we threw them into that room for an hour and said go it to final cut pro they all jumped on that Google Doc and use it as a guide. So it was like the virtual teacher in the room and that those people who knew about final cut pro were we're not going to that session they were going to a session that they actually didn't know about so that they could learn and that was really powerful because not only did we allow the experts on certain tools to go where they were novices and learn new things but we were able to have folks from all over the world who were experts on that providing the expertise for this events even though they couldn't be there in person and it really took them you know just a handful of minutes to do so we and actually I bring that up I wasn't going to talk about it but right before I jumped on this this hangout I got a tweet from someone who did a play date in LA and they showed me a page where they're still using all those docs from a year ago so that was really exciting. Wow that's pretty cool. David? David? Yeah so I started crowdsourcing kind of my memories of events with different people so it actually it started as a crowdsource Twitter chat what I always wanted was I wanted some way to be able to collect images from all of my students and kind of keep them all in one place and and be able to do it from where they are so all my kids have phones and they all use Instagram and stuff like that so I kind of learned about if this than that and then the first time I actually tested it out was at the Google Teacher Academy and what I could do real quick here is share it with you on our screen share real quick here full screen you guys are are you guys here yep can you see the screen yet not yet now we can oh almost we were so close I know sorry okay here we go are we there yeah okay great sorry thank you and so anyway so you can see just right here what happens is every single time somebody hashtag GTA CHI then their picture just went up onto onto a WordPress site and I didn't take all these pictures and I didn't have to set up a Google Drive or do all these other things just all people had to do is hashtag GTA CHI and their pictures would show up and there's a whole bunch of other pictures on here you can see it's just scrolling and it's different people and it's all their memories so then I actually have had my students doing this but what's even cooler is I've had my staff doing this so at our school we use hashtag Barron's learn and we have a WASC accreditation team showing up so I'm going to be able to show them this website and every time our teachers something interesting goes on like Mr. Zebarth wearing a dress in class you can see what's going on how the kids are learning in classes what the teachers are doing etc and it's all through our this hashtag using if this than that and WordPress blogs and it's just crowdsourcing other people what they're what they're getting it's all putting it together it's pretty cool and then one more way that I use Twitter was one time I got on and I think one of the problems that we have when we're hiring people is we use the same interview questions all the time and it was kind of driving me crazy so I just tweeted out hey what are some great interview questions and I kept tweeting it out and I got a lot of really interesting stuff and I put it up on my blog and what's awesome is like I've done some of the writing my blog this was the easiest blog post ever right because all I did was I just embedded all the tweets and so you can see there's tweets from all sorts of different people here like Bill Selleck who said describe your personal learning network that would be a great interview question Darryl Bonham said how do you move staff parents kids when they want to stand still which I thought was really awesome who was the last person in your school you apologize to and why did you do it Shelly Burgess you've just walked out of a classroom and said wow that was an amazing learning experience what did you see so and all this was just crowdsourced off of Twitter and it was sent to me and shared and it was pretty awesome so I'm gonna go ahead and come back to the hangout here and hunch your screen and here we are thanks that's really great Holly I'm just kind of wondering would you be able to sort of define crowdsource like what that means like what do you think that means well I can certainly try I don't have like an official definition in front of you but when I think of crowdsourcing I think of going to your network and using them as a crowd of experts so to speak to get information to find out things the way that David did here when he first talked about asking interview questions the first person who came into my mind was Greg Miller he lives in Canada and I noticed that he answered so so it was an effective crowdsourcing technique because he really he's delved into that a lot now he's assistant superintendent so this is a big part of his job so it's going to your network and David Weinberger I believe is the last name he talks about too big to know the smartest person in the room is the room and that's really what crowdsourcing is it's the the crowd having the knowledge and the knowledge not being linear and isolated in the book somewhere it's rather me talking to all of you and learning and that's why edu-slam I can't stop talking about it in fact people want to like shoot me I'm sure when I walk into a presentation because I'm always like oh David does a great edu-slam about that and then if you see Jenny's and then Carolyn Skibba in Chicago and and people think I'm trying to self-promote but I'm not I'm learning so much by crowdsourcing that I can't stop talking about it and I get made fun of by a few people like oh there you go again the learning and you know Jenny was giving her keynote and we were both together in South Korea last weekend and almost everything she was talking about I knew because Jenny had talked about it on our edu-slam so it was just really powerful go ahead no no good no what I was going to say is it earlier I talked about kind of off-screen before we even gone on here that crowdsourcing is just making things kind of easy for smart people you know you kind of feel lazy like you're not doing the work with other people but there is a little bit of work involved in that the your crowdsourcing will be better as you get to know more people so if the smartest person in the room is the room but your room is really big then your crowdsourcing is going to be better so if you're not involved on Twitter if you're not involved in Google plus communities it's going to be more difficult to do crowdsourcing so you have to get out there and you know just get involved in the conversation and then your room will grow and you'll see that crowdsourcing gets really impressive the reason that edu-slam works is that Holly and Tani have put in a ton of time and effort in getting to know a lot of really amazing people and me and still their room is huge and that and they've learned that also they value people's time because we don't like to waste people's time and everybody tells me that edu-slam's work because they're short and they value people's time and they're not going to have somebody wade through one hour of video to find five minutes worth of topics and so they've done the hard work of editing getting people focused finding the right people and giving content that people cares about and so their room it looks like the Coliseum. I want to add to that I think a lot of people hear words like crowdsourced and Twitter and they're turned off our friends who might be a little bit more technophobic and I just want to point out that teachers are natural crowdsourcers and so what happens all the time is you have a grade level meeting in your grade level partners room and you guys are talking about a student or debriefing a report card pickup or whatever and you notice an awesome anchor chart or really cool writer's workshop folder that they have built in you're like hey could I see that how did you do that can you show me that's crowdsourcing even though there's only two people in your room and what technology allows you to do is be in more teachers rooms and get more people's heads and take those ideas and apply them to your own practice so it's amplifying your reach and connection with other people so folks are afraid of the word crowdsourcing or think I'm I don't I can't do that that's too hard just remember any time you get an idea from a friend or a colleague or grade level partner that's crowdsourcing this is just amplifying that and speaking about like amplifying it when we when we apply that to our students and we teach them those skills because I think that that's an essential skill for students that are growing up today to be able to learn how to use their networks and use technology in a way that they can help improve their own learning so I know that Jenny that you have some really interesting things that you do with your students in that sense can you tell us a little bit about that yeah we do a couple things and I don't think it's a novel idea anymore but the idea of the student leadership team in a school that the kids are driving the boat of around technology and they're the ones with the agency so we have them the first step is to give them the power so to have them they vet the apps before we use them they write app reviews they publish they their voices really heard Holly just said we're in Korea and at Seoul foreign school their group is called tech crew satyrs which is pretty awesome and they do some great work and they were leading sessions I was in Auburn Maine same thing they have a tech crew so we give them that self-efficacy that agency to have a voice and to kind of crowdsource their knowledge they here is this app we think it's great what do you think or we don't think it's great and we've had app developers reply and actually actively seek their feedback but then they take that expertise and they share it with other folks and allow them to crowdsource from the students by doing things like app speed dating or app speed sharing where they have small groups where teachers go through each station and do a quick learn from an app and move to the next one so they're like almost like many ignite sessions with the kids to learn the apps in a high-speed high-energy basis but again all of that like I think crowdsourcing for kids is kind of two-fold it's not only about getting the great ideas but sharing it in the kids becoming a source for the crowd to learn from so it's creating more power and agency for our kids which for many of our students they don't have enough of so again it's them learning from others but also having the pulpit to to be the resource for for teachers and for their peers understanding how to vet that to tend to decide who is a source that you want to bring into your room because we have a lot of people on Twitter that we're friends with but we've really handpicked the people on edu-slime so far there's a lot of people we don't know about either and we're hoping to meet them at Isti and Q and but right now it's understanding who really are the experts David you were gonna say something no it's just gonna talk just to piggyback on what Jen said we did the same thing with us we did a snap learning with a kind of speed dating thing and our most popular session by far was the student where we had several student led sessions but was one on cheating and they're they're now being asked to speak at the district level on the same subject you know we have 150 teachers here but we have almost 4,000 students and so to look to your students as a place where you can learn from yeah absolutely turn to the students well that's what's coming next on edu-slime so that's a great segue because we are going to devote a whole maybe even month to student voice we want to know what students are thinking what they want in education what what are great lessons to them and start listening to to their ideas I just want to share very quickly before we wrap up just just so I can show you the viewers what edu-slime looks like and where they can find it so you can find edu-slam it's at edu-slam.me and .me is actually the part of the URL a lot of people don't understand that but we did want it to be edu-slam.com we wanted it to be a play on words as well as thinking outside of the box everything doesn't have to be .com anymore it's 2013 almost 2014 and so this is one of our favorites and we have two or three pages now edu-slam's teachers who are doing great innovative game-changing work in their classroom and so we hope you'll visit edu-slam.me we hope you'll also go to the blogs of our two co- presenters here and we we wanted to bring in Jenny and David because that's crowdsourcing we know that they're experts so we went into the field and asked will you help us with this because they have a lot to offer as well so thank you both David and Jenny for coming in and helping us with this presentation today thanks for inviting us yeah thank you thank you so much and any room we're in we want you in so okay thank you thank you guys thank you