M-Hub Comin' Back Strong!

Work and learning today is all about connecting people. Managers, supervisors, and business support functions should be focused on enabling connections for knowledge workers. Like artists, knowledge workers need inspiration. Too few connections mean few sources of inspiration and little likelihood of serendipity. Innovation is not so much about having ideas as it is about making connections. We know that people with more connections are also more productive.  -- Posted on Sunday, 3 March 2013 by Harold Jarche

As a proponent of connectivism  I have made Challenge Based Learning and other real world projects a central part of each course that I teach.  I have seen my students attain deep learning through social engagement through their work on real work challenges.  In each case, I've demanded that groups students explore their personal learning networks to connect with experts who can answer their questions or review their ideas.

To help teach students how to make connections, I started the M-Hub project in 2010.  M-Hub came online a year ago as a way for students to connect with mentors (such as alumnae) who possess specialized knowledge, training or experience.

Activating this database site and introducing it to MHS staff was a monumental achievement for us.  However, since then it has largely languished.  The nucleus of student project managers graduated, and the idea of researching real people instead of documents, did not come naturally in our learning community.  And I confess that all the founders lost their zeal after reaching such a major milestone.

I am glad to say that I am now working with a dedicated (and very young!) group of students who have two April projects in mind to renew interest in M-Hub.  First, our team will be facilitating tweeting at the Women Mean Business Symposium, April 23, 2013.  We will also be launching a movie that is currently in production.  We are hoping to disseminate this fifty second "commercial" about what M-Hub is and how it will help our students "create, connect, contact, and collaborate."  More soon!

On the Occasion of My 2000th Tweet

As it turns out, I tweeted for the 2000th time, a couple of weeks ago.  Actually it was a retweet, unsurprisingly about baseball from a Tiger fan who calls himself Phil Coke's Brain.  

Here it is:

My unremarkable 200th tweet.

The avatar is quite humorous, because Phil Coke is a normally mediocre player with entertaining eccentricities and odd quips.  Ironically he has performed as a hero in the recent baseball playoffs that have produced a trip to the World Series by our beloved Tigers.  It is not surprising that I would have been on Twitter during a baseball game.  I have a special column of "all star" tweeters on my Tweetdeck which I usually follow on my iPad as I watch the game on tv.  It is quite entertaining to watch the game with these fellow sports nuts during a contest.

It's much more difficult to do this at a Tiger game because getting a cellular signal is so difficult.  I was in bliss when I visited  Target Field in Minnesota. The Minnesota Twins actually provide Wi-fi for the fans, assuming that they wish to enrich the experience with their mobile devices.  In fact, the Twins had their own in-house app for mobiles.

This probably strikes some old-time fans as disrespect for the game itself.  But I would point out a couple of things.  First, I am a serious sports fan.  Aso, I love it that I do not have to wait until the next day for a newspaper to get someone's informed reaction to the game.  And, if you think about it there is a lot of dead time during a baseball (or football) game.  Plenty of time for both watching and tweeting.

This year, M-Hub is going to initiate an enrichment activity at Mercy High School using Twitter.  As far as I know it will be the first attempt to carry on a conversation through mobile devices during a school activity.  We are working with the dedicated planners of the  Women Mean Business Symposium to arrange for a Twitter hashtag during their panel presentations.  Tweeters can then have their comments projected onto a screen and perhaps some of the chirps can play into the program itself.  Hopefully this can model a best practice using social media for our students and draw them more personally into the program.

Creative Commons photo by ~Ilse

M-Hub, Launched and Running

I have posted a number of photos from our January M-Hub launch at the staff meeting. (The are supplied courtesy of Carly, one of our members and a Yearbook staffer).


We have a number of operations running, but our next main initiative will be to connect with parents.  We wish to plan forward the recruitment of parent mentors into our database.  We are partnering with the Moms and Dads Clubs to do so.


In the mean time, one student reported to me that she has made a nice connection to NYU through an alumna member.  My AP Government students will soon be using M-Hub for their challenge projects as well.

M-Hub Launch

Twenty-one months after a large group of us met to dream up M-Hub, we officially launched at a staff meeting, today.  The students, presented an introductory video and conducted to a live tour of our site.

Opening Presentation

The girls then directed the staff through search activities looking for universities, careers, etc.

Sarah directs the activities

The searches began at our Moodle portal, which serves as the home page for our intranet.  M-Hub is now linked to Moodle.

Note the Moodle link between counseling and the Media Center

We are also linked to the school's main web site in the drop down menu under alumnae:

We're between Newsletter and Spotlight

The girls led a forum discussion, handled a brief Q and A, and showed the staff our survey.  At the ending of the meeting, staff were invited to fill out the mentor survey at our site.

This was indeed a gratifying day for those of us who attended that first meet, in April, 2010!

M-Hub's First Meeting, April 20, 2010

The Day Has Come for M-Hub

From "Meet M-Hub"

Wow, it's really happening.  We invited 50 women to fill out our survey to "M-Hub" this week.  Here's the invitation:  


I welcome you to be among the very first "mentors" to visit the M-Hub web site and fill out the "Mentor Survey".  This information will not be searched by our students until January, 2012.  In the mean time we will use these first entries to test out our system.  Then, if all goes according to plan we will invite all MHS alumnae to fill out the survey soon and then orient our faculty to the site in 2012.

We are thrilled to reach this point with you.  It's been a hard long, slog since March 2010. Thank you for participating and welcome to M-Hub!  

For all our team,
Larry Baker

The surveys started coming in at once from as far away as Beijing, China.  The purpose of all this?  As our home page says, 

M-Hub enables members of the Mercy community to share their knowledge with current students. For example, students can search for Mercy community members based on various areas of expertise -- such as professional titles, hobbies, college alma mater, community service or location -- and then connect with them to gain information.

As far as I know, this is a unique secondary school venture.  I'm sure we're in for a bumpy ride going forward, but it's exciting to have reached this point in our journey.

Toward the M-Hub Launch

The M-Hub Project has been underway since March, 2010.  The student leadership nucleus who took on the project as sophomores are now eager to implement the plan they have designed to connect students with "experts" in the school community like alumnae and parents.

This enterprise has been a great learning experience for all concerned. It has been most gratifying to see the students working side by side with the partners they need to carry out their plans.  This has included regular meetings with the school's webmaster, alumnae director, and database manager.  We quickly discovered that building a database was an extremely tricky proposition.  For the past several months we have been working with the web designer to create a process for alumnae to enter information at our site that then will be searchable by our students.  We have more or less finished this challenging task, and we are drawing closer to our launch.  We are now meeting weekly to meet the following schedule:

* Enlist teachers to help identify standard "tags" for data which might help students with their projects.

* Finish the search tool for our site.

* Finish our "Featured Profile" for the site.

* Beta-test the database by enlisting our "friends of M-Hub to submit data.

* Solicit data from our alumni.

* Launch M-Hub at the January, 2012, staff meeting.

Wish us luck!

My Presentation Proposals

With my new job I have curtailed my presentation schedule, but I have just submitted proposals for presentations to a state conference and national conference.  Here are my topics:


Free Multimedia Activities for Secondary Students that Don't Gobble Time!


 A high school American Government teacher will show how to introduce robust collaborative, multimedia activities into your curriculum without devoting lots of valuable instruction time to teaching the techonologies themselves.  Multiple activities using Google Sites, Blogger, Google Docs and YouTube (all free!) will be shared.

Teaching Students to Build PLNs through Online Networking with Alumni


Learn how students at MHS network with the school's alumni through an online database.  The best part? This unique solution was designed by students!

Front Burner Techie Projects

Flickr CC Photo by basb

I am a project oriented person, and for better or for worse I tend to have three or four things going at once.  I find that I manage this pretty well until about two-thirds of the way through.  Sometimes I then get a little bored and let my mind drift to new projects. Not this time!  I am very geeked about the following techie initiatives that I can pursue as an administrator:


* Developing our school web site to incorporate a "Student Show Case" and integrate all of our sports teams' information.

* Deploying M-Hub so that students can use our web site to find  school community "experts" for career, project, and college search information.

* Developing coherent and robust curriculum for video instruction (long range)

*And the grandaddy of them all: conduct a thorough review of our school's technology use through surveys and focus groups as part of a project to take our technology infrastructure and tools into the future.

Hmnn . . . . The last one is sort of three or four in itself.

Well, I posted these as part of an effort to hold myself to following through on these.  I'll check beack with you in four months and let you know how they are going!  I have lots of help for the first goal, but if I take my eye off the other three, I will fess up.  Hopefully, I'll have good things to report down the road.

Spring Time with M-Hub

I recently sent out this missive to the friends of M-Hub, our online project for networking students with adult experts within our high school learning community.

Lest you think that M-Hub has fallen by the wayside, I thought I would give you an update on our feverish behind the scenes activity:

We are now working directly with the school web designer on the web site for M-Hub.  Our leadership team developed the home page and essential additional pages.  He did not blink when the girls asked for assorted bells & whistles, but their proposals were thought through with intelligence and careful consideration in regard to how first time visitors might respond.  They are intent on creating a clean, user-friendly environment.

Some of M-Hub's finest!

On April 18, two teams of students met under the supervision of Susan Smith, alumna and Art Department Chair.  They designed features for our student profile page and data collection page (The one that we will be inviting many of you to visit in the near future).  I passed their ideas on to the web designer who has already installed them on the site.

Essentially, there was much more work and planning for the web infrastructure than we ever imagined, but thanks to the terrific support of Will Gervais (Administration) and Julie Earle (Advancement), we remain undaunted and have made amazing progress in creating a site that is surpassing our wildest dreams.

Obviously, we still lack data before M-Hub can be rolled out as a useful networking tool for our students.  So that will be an immense task for Fall.  Then, attendant upon that chore, we will have a major educational task for members of our learning community.  But we have every reason to believe that M-Hub can be operational for the 2011-12 school year.  

Some final notes:

* Those of you who participated in our Zoomerang beta-test made a very valuable contribution to this year's progress.

* The M-Hub Project has remained student-driven.  What you will eventually see will be the result of a marvelous collaboration between our dedicated students and various adults they have tapped for expertise.  The goal of M-Hub is "to help MHS students build learning networks which leverage technology."  Essentially, building M-Hub has provided this very type of experience.

* We are trying to be foresighted in terms of creating a basic site to which modules can be added if M-Hub becomes as robust as we hope.

* School Administration has given unqualified support to our venture.  They have encouraged the girls every step of the way.

Thanks for your interest and support,

L.

M-Hub Update

An open letter to the many friends of M-Hub project:  

Last week marked a couple of wonderful milestones.  It was almost exactly a year ago when we had our first after school meeting to discuss the possibility of creating a network of "experts" from within the Mercy community that our our students could tap for their project, career, and college research.

The idea flowed out of my experience in the classroom with Challenge Based Learning-- an instructional design that calls for student teams to solve real-world problems  For example, students in two of my courses are engaged in fighting teenage apathy and reducing the cost of health care.  All teams are actively engaged with the outside community.  Not only have they leveraged technology, but they also have leveraged their personal networks, consulting with judges, state troopers, professional video producers, doctors, social workers, insurance experts, etc.  M-Hub was envisioned to enhance this sort of exploration.

Thanks to terrific support from our school administration and advancement office, we made tremendous progress toward bringing our project to fruition.  Last spring, we answered some important issues about access, privacy,  and platform.  In the Fall we ran a beta test for data collection and had important meetings regarding the technical realization of our quest.  However, in order to truly integrate our site with the school's we needed technical assistance which went far beyond our abilities.  Here the administration stepped in and helped us pay for a web designer to build our site.  Today I am happy to tell you that our domain name has been registered and construction has started on . . . .

http://mercy-mhub.net/

Our terrific student leadership team has an important meeting on Wednesday with Mercy's webmaster, Julie Earle. What we have accomplished in a year is pretty remarkable, and there is so much more to come.

Last Friday it was my pleasure to tell the story of M-Hub to the annual MACUL Conference at Cobo Center.  My presentation is available for your perusal at allcbl.com.

Yours truly,

Larry Baker

The Inside-Out Knowledge Network

As the year draws to a close this week, I am republishing five favorite Drive-thru items from 2010.  Today's item first  appeared in April.  The idea of the "inside-out" approach to teaching PLNs is original as far as I know.  Since working it out last spring, I've found at conferences that the approach resonates with listeners.


 In my last post I advocated helping our students learn to build personal learning networks by encouraging them to seek specific information to their questions in real time from real people. I think that this should be done "inside-out" by guiding them to familiar resources within their schools, families, and local community.

In Five 10th Graders Jump Outside of the Box, I think I demonstrated how authentic and self-directed this can be. In Rewiring the Learning Networks for Schools, I shared a video which shows how students can "cultivate their curiosity"* by asking nuanced questions to experts and then expressing the experience through multi-media.

Now, granted, at a college prep school like ours we teach students to write research "papers" with formal annotation using vetted sources from academic journals and the like. I am not demanding that we abandon this age-old "college prep" system for culling information and synthesizing it to support a thesis. But in terms of guiding our students to authentically learn about topics and get their real questions answered, why aren't we networking them with real-time experts and real-time persons? It would be ironic to suppose that the teacher down the hall is only an expert on her subject when she is assigned to teach a certain set of students a certain time of the day. To heck with the schedule. Let's make her available to any student in the school.

Then, let's build this network "inside-out". Let's add folks within the reach of our school community to our grid. Whenever I've brainstormed with classes of students about finding "experts" we've always identified parents, friends' parents, or persons these parents know. We have alumnae who are experts in all fields imaginable. In virtually every instance, whenever a student has approached one of these persons for knowledge, they have enthusiastically welcomed this. Why can't we start collecting persons like these in a database so that we can tap them with an email question, an interview or even invite them to one of our classes as a speaker?

And don't you dare shoot this idea down by suggesting that I am trying to replace a school library or setting up these "experts" to be barraged by inquiries. Our conceptual framework of research is so far removed from this at the present time to render these concerns absurd. Besides, we would not add someone to our grid without his or her explicit permission.

Yes, I have very definite ideas about approaching this exciting challenge. In my next post I am going to explain (drum roll, please) The M-Hub Project-- "A knowledge hub project designed to leverage new technologies in order to facility authentic learning experiences for Marlins of all ages."

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Screen Shot "Personal Learning Network" Ning

M-Hub Web Site

With all the activity going on with M-Hub, I have updated our project web site.  If you would like to join in this unique and exciting endeavor, please contact me at lrbaker@mhsmi.org.

M-Hub Web Site

Knowledge Hubs Rock!

It is exciting to be part of a dynamic team which is moving forward on an original online project. I'm talking about my terrifically loyal and dedicated student leadership team and its M-Hub Project.  What started up as a concept, last March, is moving toward the implementation phase at a rate I never believed possible.

M-Hub's quest is to build a database of experts on wide-ranging topics, starting with folks in the immediate MHS family-- parents, alumnae and staff.  The hope is that such a database could then be made available to students in order to help them learn how to construct personal learning networks.  The enterprise involves three major steps: 1) collecting data   2) tagging data  3) making the data available to students in a sound, accessible way.
We are on the verge of moving ahead on all three fronts:

*We have discovered that Zoomerang is a viable tool for collecting data.  We have beta-tested a survey and discovered that with a few simple questions we could collect a rich trove of data.

*We have a meeting scheduled today with an expert database manager who is willing to help us with a scheme to categorize and tag our data.

*The school web designer is eager to meet with us in order to learn our specs for the plug-in to our school web site that will allow students to access the data.

As staff proceed with their plans to design and implement Challenge Based Learning projects, I have begun to encourage them to believe that M-Hub may be operational by spring.  The Drive-thru will keep you posted!

MAME37 Presentations -- Dearborn Hyatt Regency

It's great to be back at the MAME Annual Conference this year.  This will be my third appearance at a MAME activity, and the school library media specialists are a favorite audience.    Last year, I introduced a presentation on my digital anthology, a topic I repeated for the MHS staff and the MACUL Cloud Conference.

Today, I am presenting on the following topics:

(12:45- 1:45) Using Apple’s Challenge-Based Learning to Build Learning Networks
Apple's Challenge-Based Learning model fosters authentic understanding and leverages technology. Students use the web for research, planning, and collaborating while seeking solutions. The media specialist's role as guide will be explored.

(2:00 - 3:00) Building A Knowledge Hub for Your Learning Community presented by Larry Baker
Baker's M-Hub Project helps life-long learners build personal learning networks.  It is grounded in the Department of Education's "2010 National Educational Technology Plan."  Staff are networked as real-time resources.

This will be the maiden voyage of my M-Hub preso-- It has recently been accepted for MACUL at Cobo Center in March.  But today will be unique, because I will be honored with the assistance of two student leaders from M-Hub.

As promised to attendees, here are the slides of the presentations: 

Challenge Based Learning 1

Challenge Based Learning 2

Challenge Based Learning 3

Building A Knowledge Hub

  

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Screen capture from CBL 2

M-Hub Update

My involvement with Challenge Based Learning has been pretty all-consuming these days.  But M-Hub has grabbed my attention in a big way.  This is largely due to having a remarkable student-leadership team which is bent on getting things done has helped move moved M-Hub from an interesting idea to a reality.

The basic concept of M-Hub is to provide studetns with a tool for building personal learning networks within our greater school community.  We want to build a highly searchable database of "expert" alumnae, staff, parents for students to contact for a wide variety of information.


The idea has received support from all parties, but actualizing the plan has been challenging.  Suddenly, we have major break throughs

Data Collection
We believe that Zoomerang can provide us with a polling instrument that we can send out by email or link to a web site.  If the "free version" is too limited, we think that the "pro" pay version can certainly meet our needs.  We are ready to begin building a prototype.

Web Solution
Finding a place to store our data which would allow students to gain access has been more perplexing.  However, with the help of some "seed money" from the school we will be able to secure the services of a web designer who is going to begin constructing the back end of this database.  He also is confident that the data from Zoomerang will be easy to import to the web site.  Working with Drupal our web designer will be able to integrate this feature right into the school's web site.

Fund Raising
In order to pay for the complete services of the web designer and meet other expenses such as an upgrade to Zoomerang Pro, we will need to raise funds.  Here, our status as a school club comes hand.  With 25 club members its feasible host activities.  One likely possibility is a sale of M-Hub logo flash drives.



Leveraging Technology
I'm also pleased to note that while we are not overtly a "tech club",  we are pretty clever at finding virtual tools to help us keep pushing M-Hub along.  We use "Doodle" to schedule leadership meetings.  We also carry on discussions between meetings on a private blog site created with iWeb.

MAME /MACUL
The world is about to hear about M-Hub.  Two of the student leaders and I will be presenting our project to the school library media specialists at MAME 37, this week.  I also just learned that M-Hub has been selected as a topic for the 2011 MACUL Conference at Cobo Center in March.

What a rush!

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Screen capture of M-Hub leadership private blog site

Fired Up or Burned Out?

I have a friend who often remarks that I should "write a book" about fighting burn out. She says she doesn't know other teachers of my vintage who are so dismissive of retirement. I always laugh this off, but secretly I take it as a high compliment.

Of course, from time to time my enthusiasm is sorely tested. This week , when the temperatures have stayed in the 90's F, I thought I might literally reach my boiling point in my unairconditioned class room-- talk about burn out!

But other more chronic matters test my endurance:

* The mundane several-times-daily chores of taking attendance and dealing with absence.
* The continual babysitting duties of homeroom or student assemblies.
*The too-frequent P.A. break-ins at the beginning of class for our fund-raisers yammering and the like.
* Burned out teachers who project the bitterness of their own lives onto students or administrators.
* Parents and students who only care about grades.
* Parents and students who don't care about anything related to school

But strangely, though I can whip off my share of gripes in a moment's notice, I've actually looked forward to each day of school as I begin my 36th year in the trade. That's because it doesn't have to be routine. Teaching is one of those rare professions that allows one to erase all old business and start fresh. Each year, I initiate at least one new project. I'm taking a new approach to assessment in American Government. Each course has new projects Soon after that, I will be throwing myself into M-Hub, a new extra-curricular interest.

I have a new professional development role at the school and I am engaged in an exciting Challenged Based learning project with Apple Education. Teaching in general and my school in particular allow for an infinite number of approaches and methods. I guess, depending on they look at it, that's something folks in my field shut out or embrace. I think the latter mind-set is the way to keep the burn out at arm's length.

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"Red / Day 40 (themed)" Flickr CC photo by Aaron Gosselin

What Motivates Us (and our students)

I was quite delighted to come across "The surprising truth about what motivates us" video produced by the RSA. It's a wonderful animation of a compelling ten minute talk by Dan Pink. It contends that clear evidence shows that bonus money is not an effective motivator for complex cognitive tasks. Instead, autonomy, mastery, and purpose are the keys to better performance and personal satisfaction.

Though this video is aimed at a business audience, the implications for education are enormous.

Students: Let's apply the lessons of "What Motivates Us" to our students by substituting grades for bonus money. Most of the students I teach are motivated to get good grades, but the system too often does not motivate these same students to learn. They memorize information or ask the teacher, "What do you want". They think nothing of copying each other's homework or notes. They read Sparks Notes to pass their literature assignments. It's a game.

CBL

The themes of the video dovetail perfectly with my Challenge Based Learning experiences. I saw students genuinely excited about the quests they were shaping. In several cases they went far beyond my expectations. And by giving them control they took their topics in different and far more imaginative directions than I might have assigned. (The stopped asking me what I wanted when it was clear I wouldn't play the game). Knowing that they were creating for the benefit of others and knowing that they would report their ideas to their classmates, made a huge impact on their motivation.

Teachers

I think the video explains in part why teachers are so resistant to change: 1) They enjoy their autonomy in the classroom and their sense of mastery over the material. Pink's work also has important implications for staff development: change will only be achieved through motivators of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. It can't be imposed top-down or through a regimented design.

M-Hub This project has come together so quickly because it taps into these motivators, particularly the sense of purpose. When we go live, M-Hub will benefit the entire school community. Already, students and staff have devoted many hours to the project. Will it help their "grades" or effect their pay? Of course not. Speaking for myself, I've been far more engaged in it than some of the things I get paid to do.

I would love to hear your reactions to the video.

Enriched by Networks

I'd be a different and poorer person without my PLN . In the last couple of weeks, I've

*Collaborated on Challenge Based Learning with an amazing educator in Nebraska.

*Shared secret techie anxieties and laughs with a middle school teacher in Colorado.

*Chatted about M-Hub with a doctor in Africa.

* Joked about the Tigers with a beat reporter as he covered the game.

* Joined a wonderful new and improved ADE community site. Apple challenges us, but makes us feel good about ourselves.

*Swapped music and blogging tips with a University student.

*Learned about cloud databases from a generous mind in Great Britain.

*Suggested a question to a beat reporter for an NBA press conference. He says he will ask it.

*Asked for advice about web sites from a journalist in China.

*Read interesting blogs, commented on interesting blogs, and written ... blogs

P.S. I've been collaborating with a peer on researching copyright-free music for student projects. Decided to add some Magnatune music to the site. Please indicate in poll whether to keep or ditch.

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"Yellow Flower" Flickr Creative Commons Photo by introspectivo - Muito ocupado / Very busy's photostream

The Latest M-Hub Hubbub

For those of you who have been following the progress of M-Hub, here's an update:

* Over 20 staff, students, and administrators have attended our two general meetings.

* We have held three core leadership meetings, two platform meetings, and one club life meeting.

* We have a logo (see side panel)

* We have a mission statement (M-Hub connects the Mercy community through personal networks, furthering the learning of our students).

* We have been recognized with official "club" status at the school. We sought this in order to involve more students in the project and root ourselves more deeply in the school culture.

* Most importantly, we have made tremendous strides towards identifying a platform upon which we can build our network. After meetings with staff from our Tech Department, Advancement Office, and our web designer we are guardedly confident that the M-Hub site can be built with drupal (the same back-end system used by the White House site!) and accessible to our students with their school IDs.

We have meetings scheduled this spring to discuss formats for our data collection. We also want are working on security and user policies. At this point we are confident that we can start collecting, recruiting, and building for our ambitious project in September.

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Screen Shot from Apple Challenge Based Learning M-Hub page.

Unintended Consequences

Sometimes the lights all shining on me

Other times I can barely see

Lately it occurs to me

What a long strange trip it's been.

From "Truckin'" -- Robert Hunter

I'm fascinated by how many times I've headed off in a direction with educational technology, only to end up in an unexpected location:

* The Web Warriors. A year ago, Rick Strobl and I began a web site to aggregate some of our favorite web tools. Rick did most of the work, and I had the hazy idea that the site would help promote with my ambition to make presentations outside of my school. How ironic then that the site would become such a dominant feature within Mercy's sophomore curriculum. For English and American Government most tenth graders are required to produce podcasts. The majority use Audacity, a free cross-platform sound editor. Rick installed tutorials and key download link for the application at our site. Now nearly every Mercy High School tenth grader goes visits the Web Warriors. Not exactly how I envisioned this working, but pretty cool all the same.

* After returning from the 2009 ADE Summer Institute, I was determined to try Challenge Based Learning with my American Government classes. I wasn't sure how well it would work, but I went ahead and wrote a proposal for a CBL presentation at 2010 MACUL. When I plunged into designing the CBL projects I expected it to radically effect my courses and students. What I did not anticipate was how much the students' ambitions would influence how I looked at networking and research. When my students began to fearlessly contact lawyers, judges, academicians, doctors, insurance agents, campaign managers, military officers, etc.; I decided to take networking to another level with M-Hub. My plan is to place students in touch with staff (past and present), parents, and alumnae for purposes like academic research or career guidance. The experience of engaging in CBL actually kicked me up to a new level of passion about and commitment to guiding students as they learn how to network.

I have no idea what strange destination the M-Hub Project may lead me to. But thus far, my tech treks have given me one helluva ride!

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Screen Capture from Web Warriors