training – iLearn Technology

Acting on hindsight #edchat

January 13, 2014Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment2665 views

I hate that we have to do trainings like this. I really do. It breaks my heart that within 15 minutes of Anastasis 3 major school shootings have taken place. I hate that I know what it is like to wait on the outside. That I know intimately how it breaks families when their child is the one. That I also know what it is like to worry about kids I’ve known since they were 5. It doesn’t get easier.

I also hate that we have to do fire drills. The reality of why we have to do those drills makes me sad. That a fire drill exists because there were some who died in a fire is equally sad. Yet we do them regularly. I can’t remember a time when I actually heard of a child dying in a school fire, but I’m sure it has happened. So we run drills. 6 times every year. We practice getting out of the building safe so that, heaven forbid, if a fire ever happened, evacuating would feel second nature. We would all know what to do.

No matter how many times we train, when tragedy strikes it feels different. Time slows down and, at the same time, goes impossibly fast. Decisions matter. This is when we fall back on all of the training and hope that our muscles remember what their job is. We work hard to be calm for kids. We know implicitly that we will do anything to keep our kids safe.

I was in a neighboring high school during the Columbine school shooting. This was the first time that I remember ever being in “Lock down.” My algebra 2 teacher quickly locked the classroom door. We turned out the lights. We stayed out of site from the door and were asked to be totally silent. Later we would turn on the TV (cable in the classroom was new), and watch as friends poured out of the high school down the street. We would keep lists of those we saw so that we could tell each other who we knew was accounted for. Afterward I would hear stories from those inside about how it went. Some hid in closets. Some under tables. All waited. In some cases that waiting led to friends dying under the neighboring table. Hindsight is always 20/20. Now we know how quickly it was all over inside the school. Now we look at the number of law enforcement on the outside of the school with all of their armor and weapons and wonder why they sat and waited SO long on the outside. Now we wonder why those who could evacuate stayed where they were and waited…even knowing that there was a gunman in the building. Hindsight is hard. There is so much to do differently.

But we don’t really. 15 years later and little has changed about how we respond to danger. A shooter in the building and we tell teachers and students to stay put and wait.

Now I have my own school. Anastasis Academy. It is incumbent on me to use that hindsight to prepare differently. I know how this goes. I still hate that it is necessary. It still gives me that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that somehow by preparing, we would be inviting trouble. I guess this is the same reason people don’t like writing wills. That superstition that if they don’t do it- nothing can happen because they won’t be ready. The real world doesn’t wait for us to be ready.

Social Media has done a lot of great things for me professionally. It pushed me to start a school. Most recently, a connection I first made online, led to a friendship. @laurascheer isn’t an educator. We started talking on Twitter because she has kids of her own. She is interested in education as a parent. Then we realized we live within 5 minutes of each other and met. Laura introduced me to a client of hers, @taconeconsulting. I had no idea a company like Tac One existed.

Being in charge of a school is hard. It is hard to balance what you know about kids, with what you know about the world, and what you know about liability. But I’ve seen school shootings up close. I know how they go. I had a hard time doing lock down the way that every other school does lock down. I guess I was waiting for permission to trust my instincts. After the Arapahoe shooting, Laura messaged me and asked if we would be interested in having Tac One Consulting come out and train us.
I immediately accepted (despite the irrational “jinx” alarm in my mind). On Saturday all Anastasis staff went through Tac One’s Beyond Lockdown Training. I’m so glad that we did! Joe helped us see that this is no different from preparing for a fire. The hope is always that all the training will go without a test. But, in the instance that you need it, you have it.

The team teaches what I’ve always suspected should be the case: if your students are able to get out of the building (where all the law enforcement is…or will soon be…hanging out) do it. Evacuation is the best case scenario, NOT sitting and waiting the way many of us have been told to do for 15 years. Tac One even taught us how to evacuate so that we do so in a safe, smart way.

If for some reason we can’t get out of the building, we were taught how to secure our classrooms. Joe walked us through each room and helped us think through what could be used to do this. Visualizing what is available puts your mind at ease. You have a plan, you aren’t left sitting in the dark. We also learned about various guns. What they look like, how they work, what the bullets and magazines look like. If you come upon a hallway with discarded magazines, you now have a better idea of what you are dealing with. Knowledge is power. We were taught how to disarm a shooter in a “safe” manner (not sure this is ever safe). We took turns practicing this on Tac One’s bad guy, John. We learned how to more safely navigate halls, how to fight back if it all goes poorly, etc.

I’ll say it again, I pray that I will NEVER need any of this knowledge. But I also hope I will never need fire drill knowledge. I also hope I will never have to put our tornado drill to the test. I will continue to run our staff through ALL of these drills and trainings because I haven’t figured out how to predict the future or how to prevent bad things from happening.

I am beyond thankful for Tac One’s training not only from a tactical standpoint, but also for the reminder of the truly incredible people I’ve surrounded myself with. This was a great reminder of the trust that I have in my staff. If I ever need someone to have my back, I’m glad that they are around!

School administrators- I encourage you to take a good look at your lock down procedures. Are you doing the same things that have been done for the past 15 years? Even with all we know about how this goes?

Teachers- You are the first line of defense. Protecting kids falls on your shoulders. If your school has a tired lock down policy, encourage them to look at a training like Tac One offers.

Parents- Know what your child’s school does to keep your kids safe. If there is room to grow, push. This is important. Pray that it never happens, but don’t make assumptions that it won’t ever happen to your child’s school.

It is up to us to protect that which is most precious. I want to know that I’ve taken every possible measure to do that. Before Laura pointed me to Joe at Tac One, I didn’t know such a training was available to schools. It is. Check it out.

Thank you Joe at @taconeconsulting and @laurascheer very much appreciated!

Paper Tweetup- Success!

March 30, 2011March 30, 2011Kelly Tenkely29 Comments4741 views

Yesterday, I held a tweetup at a local coffee shop to teach teachers about Twitter using…paper! The idea was to give teachers, of varying tech levels, a concrete way to learn the ins and outs of Twitter before actually jumping in with the technology. I wanted teachers to really understand the social nature of Twitter before worrying about the technical aspects.

It was a huge success! Our biggest problem of the day was the noise of ice being crushed for smoothies, if you have ever run a tech training this is pretty small bananas!

You can read (and watch) about how I planned for this Tweetup here. As teachers arrived, I handed them a paper Twitter packet. In the packet they found a half sheet screen shot of a Twitter wall with explanation call outs of important features, a name tag with their @ Twitter name, a password card for their classroom twitter account, an envelope with “DM” printed on the front, a stack of sticky notes with their Twitter handle on it, and a pen. I created a paper Twitter wall using that huge sticky note chart paper and stuck it to the wall of the coffee shop. After explaining how paper tweeting would work and giving them a run down of some of the Twitter lingo (wall, follow, DM, hash tag, RT, @ reply), I let them start “tweeting”. #edchat was going on at the same time. I knew that these teachers wouldn’t be ready to jump into that conversation online in their first venture out into the Twitter world, so I took the conversation to them in our paper tweeting. I gave the teachers the same topic and invited them to paper tweet responses. They wrote out a response and stuck it to one of the paper Twitter walls. I read the tweets out loud as they came in so that the teachers could write some @ replies. Everyone seemed to love passing private notes back and forth using the DM envelopes.

It was a fun time of socializing and I think everyone grasped the power of Twitter as a communication tool. At the end of the session I let them login to their actual Twitter accounts and practice sending a few tweets. This worked out really well because they already had lists to follow that I created for them and all of their accounts are already following each other. They had a built-in PLN to work with as soon as they logged on. This helped a lot! Today teachers will be taking Twitter into their classrooms and using it with students.

Result of the paper tweetup: success!

Paper Tweeting: Social Media in the Classroom

March 28, 2011March 28, 2011Kelly Tenkely17 Comments4710 views

I’m currently working with an elementary and middle school to roll out a school wide social media campaign. I have had a lot of questions about this so I thought I would make a video sharing how that decision was made and how we are approaching it. Yes, I did film this video today…although the calendar says spring, Colorado woke up to SNOW this morning-hence the furry hooded sweater. 🙂

If you don’t have time to watch the video, here are the highlights:

This private school decided to roll out a social media campaign to let the local community learn more about the school in hopes of increasing enrollment numbers. I let the superintendent know that Twitter was not a marketing tool, people won’t follow accounts that are constantly broadcasting information. That being said, stories are compelling and people will follow accounts that tell a compelling story, and that invite conversation.
The most compelling story in a school comes from the students. Letting students be the voice of the school does a few things: 1. It gives students a place to reflect on their learning. 2. It gives the community and parents an authentic look at what is happening in the classroom. 3. It allows us to model proper use of social media as we use Twitter WITH students. 4. It gives students a sense of pride in their school and a sense of ownership over what they do there.
Because this campaign is being rolled out with elementary students, there are some special considerations. Twitter clearly states in its terms of use that users must be 13 years old or older. Students don’t have an individual Twitter account; instead, each classroom has an account. Classes will Tweet using the interactive whiteboard as a class.
The administration wanted to make this process as simple as possible for teachers. They asked me to create a Twitter account for every classroom, specialist, and administrator in the building.
The administration made this campaign optional for teachers. This was HUGE, instead of it feeling like one more thing added to the teacher’s already full plates, they got to make the decision to opt in. Out of 30 elementary teachers 20 are attending our Tweetup tomorrow!
The communications manager of the school is running the main School account. She will be following a list of all of the classrooms tweeting and re-tweet the best of the best. The main school account will be the “face” of the school on the Internet.
The administration is Tweeting as well, they have a unique and different view of the school than the classroom teachers and students do.
I created several lists for teachers to follow, there is a list for every discipline and age group as well as a list of other classes and student authors that tweet.
I linked every Twitter account with a Facebook Fan page for the classroom. I turned off all commenting features so that (for now) teachers don’t have to keep track of both platforms. The Facebook Fan Page will most likely be accessed by parents who do not use Twitter so that they can still receive class updates.

Tomorrow I am holding a Tweetup. I BEGGED that this not look like typical tech training. You know the kind…tired teachers crammed in the computer lab at the end of the day to learn a new tool. Been there, done that. Unless you are a mega tech geek like me, you just really don’t appreciate those kind of trainings! I was afraid if we approached this training the way we approach all other trainings, teachers would instantly have to get past that barrier. Instead, we are meeting at a local coffee shop after school. I sent out fun invitations and made sure teachers knew that this was a SOCIAL event. After all, we are talking social media!

Because I know this staff well (I worked with them for 7 years, these are my friends!), I also have the benefit of knowing how comfortable they are with technology. I suspect that they are pretty typical of school staffs everywhere. There are some who are very comfortable with new technologies, and some who have trouble filling out a login form on their own. I didn’t want technology to be a barrier for those who aren’t comfortable with it, so I decided to steal an idea from my friend @mcteach. She does a paper blogging project with her students where they learn to blog and comment using paper before technology even enters the picture. I LOVED the idea and thought it could be adapted for my Twitter Tweetup. I made a video describing my paper tweeting method below.

Again, if you don’t have time for the video, here are the highlights:

I created a paper Twitter wall on chart paper that looks pretty similar to the actual Twitter wall (if I do say so myself). This will be up on the wall at the coffee shop during our tweetup. The Twitter wall is blank, ready for teacher tweets to fill it up.
I made a name tag for each teacher with their @username. You know those “hello my name is”? Yeah, it is that with their twitter handle. Rule of the day, if you are mentioning someone by name, there must be an @ preceding it 🙂
I have a stack of 10 sticky notes for each teacher with their twitter handle and “picture” at the top of the note and “140” at the bottom. This is where teachers will compose their tweets. The sticky note messages get stuck to the Twitter wall chart I created. My hope is that teachers will begin to understand the public nature of Twitter in a concrete way.
I have regular envelopes that I have written DM on. Teachers can use these to deliver DM’s to a friend. Again, I wanted a concrete way of understanding the difference between a DM (Direct Message) and an @ reply.
Since tomorrow is #edchat, I’ll be prompting discussion for our paper tweetup with the #edchat topic tomorrow. This will give me the opportunity to talk about RT (retweets) and hashtags.
In addition to #edchat discussion, I’ll ask teachers to share something that happened in their classrooms today as a tweet, helping them begin thinking about how to use Twitter in their classrooms.
I’ll encourage teachers to try a paper tweetup with their students so that they understand Twitter before using the technology.
After our paper tweeting session, I’ll let teachers hop on to Twitter and try it out while I am there to answer questions and help with any technical difficulties. I really don’t want to focus on the tool, but on the connections and conversations that Twitter enables. Twitter makes it easy to do this because the platform is so simple to use.

I think tomorrow will be fun, I’ll be sure to take some pictures and share them! If you missed them the first time around, here is a link to the Twitter posters that I created for the classrooms.