Sunday, August 11, 2019

#CUEhoot Where Lead Learners Gather

By Jen Roberts, SDCUE Member

What do you get when you combine thirty educators, Monterey Bay, and barbecue? A great day of learning and connecting we call the CUE Hoot.

Most CUE members probably don’t know that CUE has a group called Lead Learners. These are folks who present a lot at CUE events and often get asked to present for CUE to districts and schools. Keeping with the philosophy that learners need to stay connected to each other, CUE hosts a free event once a year called the Hootenanny just for lead learners. This year they held their third annual #CUEhoot and I got to go.

The location alternates and changes. Last year it was in San Diego at the Maritime Museum and this year it was at the Seymour Marine Science Center in Santa Cruz. I love that they always place it somewhere educational and senic.

We always end up tweeting a lot from the #CUEhoot and people who aren’t lead learners often ask me what it is all about. It’s pretty simple really. We spend a day together connecting with people we haven’t met yet, getting some updates about what’s new and coming soon from CUE, attend sessions about presenting better, or learn more about a technical tool. In the afternoon we share out wacky ideas, share what we are most passionate about in short #CUEbooms

The morning session I went to was called IRL Time with Pam. Pam Hernandez is the new executive director of CUE, so this session was about getting to hear from her, but mostly about her listening to us. Lead learners are not shy about sharing, and that includes their thoughts and ideas about what would make CUE even better. Our conversation mostly focused on how to spread the word that CUE exists to support teachers and also ways we can give that support to teachers K-12 and in higher education.

In the afternoon I joined the photo-walk lead by Jason Seliskar and John Miller. The crashing waves, wildflowers, and open ocean of Monterey Bay gave us a scenic place to wander and practice our photo skills. A lot of us prefer to use our own photos in presentations, so this kind of ties into being a lead learner right?

We closed with CUE Booms and some slides karaoke, which is as ridiculous as it sounds, but fun to present without warning. Presenters have to know how to roll with whatever happens in the moment.

The real magic of the #CUEhoot is putting faces to the people I’ve only met online, discovering the genius of some I had never met, and reconnecting with friends I only get to see a few times a year. Along the way we learn, share, eat well and laugh a lot.

If you regularly present at SDCUE, or other CUE events you might be interested in becoming a lead learner too. Find out more at https://cue.org/leadlearners/


Member Spotlight: Jen Roberts

Jen’s Story

In 2007 her principal recommended Jen as a teacher for a 1:1 laptop pilot program. “The funny thing though, is she didn’t check with me first. So, I just got this email asking me to participate and listing all of these requirements. I didn’t want to do it. I had a seven-month old baby and a five-year-old at home. I wrote back, telling them all the things that were wrong with their requirements and saying no.” Then the organizer called her and said they had changed their plans because of her feedback and talked her into participating.

It took six months to get the laptops into her classroom and when they arrived they were running a version of Linux without any of the Microsoft or Mac software she knew how to use. “When I found out they didn’t have Word I was frustrated. I teach English. What were my students supposed to use to write? Then Mary Lange told me, ‘There’s this thing called Google Docs,’ and invited me to a training.” She went, taking her student teacher along with her.

Jen and her students embraced Google tools. First just Docs, and then the Docs list morphed into Drive. She learned to use Sheets and Sheets included Forms. (Jen’s very first SDCUE session was about Google Forms in 2009.) “Very quickly my students and I found that Docs and Forms made our classroom more efficient. We figured out a way to use one Google Doc and keep adding the small assignments to the top. We drastically reduced the amount of paper we used. We experimented with things like having a group analyze a text together using just the chat window on the doc. The room was silent, but I could watch all their thinking in the comments.”

At the time Jen taught American Lit to juniors. “It was not AP. It was not even honors. This was regular American Lit and some of my students were not on track to graduate. When the laptops came in tough, something changed. We were the only classroom with laptops. My students felt really special and proud about it. Without knowing it, our first lessons were about digital citizenship when I had them set up gmail accounts with their real names. The laptops gave us access to write blogs, and post book reviews online. Research became a thing we did everyday, and not a special trip to the library.”

Thanks to a tweet she saw and her enthusiasm for using Google tools with her students, Jen applied to the Google Teacher Academy in 2011. “I didn’t know it was competitive. When one of the organizers told me how many people applied my jaw dropped and my imposter syndrome set in. The people in that room were brilliant.” At the time CUE organized the GTA in partnership with Google. “From there I was hooked. I went to spring CUE and met up with people I had met in Seattle. I started presenting more and blogging more. I couldn’t not share the things that were working in my classroom.”

Eventually, Jen and her co-author Diana Neebe wrote a book about teaching with 1:1. Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning is available from Stenhouse Publishers. “It’s a labor of love to support other teachers who are just getting started with their own 1:1 classrooms. I’ll never forget that I tried to say no, and had to get talked into letting laptops in my classroom. I know lots of other teachers are still hesitant, and I don’t blame them for being apprehensive. The book was our way to try to share what we learned and make the process easier for our colleagues.”