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Envisioning the Future of �Digital Communication

So a little about me…my name is Hallie McCormick and I am the coordinator for school and educator programs at the Nelson-Atkins museum of art. I grew up in Kansas City and came here on field trips and later as a college student studying art history. I want this museum to be both a resource and safe haven for all students growing up in the Kansas City area just as it was for me.

To be a vibrant resource, I want to reach teachers beyond the walls of the museum. I want to have a place where teachers from all over Kansas City metro area with all different levels of school and district funding can find inspiration. In order to develop this idea, I know I need to hear from you, the actually educators in the classroom so we can build it together. This takes us to the focus of this presentation.

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Let’s Build a Digital Teacher Community.

A space to share resources, ask questions and get feedback.

Develop a community of like-minded educators.

Centralized space for classroom activities pre and post Nelson-Atkins visit.

- share images of projects

- share museum visit experiences

- discussions on assignments and their

outcome�

…How I want to build a digital teacher community.

So what exactly do I mean by a digital teacher community? This idea came about because we knew there was a desire for you to share your experiences that you had on school tours and workshops at the Nelson-Atkins Museum. I wanted to take it one step farther and create a centralized space where teachers around the Kansas City area could go to look for inspiration for pre and post visit activities for when you visit the nelson-atkins museum. I wanted pictures of class art projects, or discussions on varying assignments you were doing in your classrooms to prep students to their museum visit. I even wanted this community to expand past just discussing pre/post visit museum activities to where you could use the space as a community of like minded teachers to bounce curriculum ideas off one another, share interesting articles, or ask advice. All in the mix would still be the Nelson-Atkins sharing resources, asking for teacher feedback on programs and encouraging the conversation. This was my perfect ideal vision of a digital teacher community.

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Fast facts

This idea is new.
This idea is still growing.
To grow more, we want to hear from YOU.
We are ready for any crazy, experimental idea from you.
We have a general idea of what we think is going well…
…and what is not going well.

So our first step in working towards this perfect, ideal vision was to just focus on developing our Nelson-Atkins Museum Educator Facebook page and turning that into an inspirational digital space. While we’ve nearly doubled our Facebook page followers and now have much more engagement with each post than we did when we started this in January, I still want to make it more exciting and include more voices, perspectives and ideas.

That is why I am here.

For the next 10 minutes or so I am going to give you an overview of what has gone well so far and what has failed. Then I’ll have you all break up into small groups to discuss and brainstorm what you as classroom educators would like to see further developed or included in the digital community. After about a 25 minute brainstorm, we’ll share out our ideas to the group.

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Three �examples of what �went well…

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1

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Shares!

Likes!

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What makes you comment on social media?

a. When you are interested or curious in the subject.

b. When you’re knowledgeable on the subject.

c. When you disagree with the subject

d. Other?

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2

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Engagement Goals!

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3

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Building a community of shared resources

Build a resource that is deeper than social media interaction.�
A resource that is not a top-down format.�

- teachers can upload helpful resources and pose questions in an open forum-like format.

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What is the proper platform?

Group workshop overview

Does not have to be structured through a major social media platform
If using a social media platform, how would you improve its structure?

Increasing engagement
Inclusive questions
Useful resources

So what is the proper platform? I don’t have the answer to that. This is where I will look to you and this presentation begins to shift into a collaborative discussion.

We’re going to break into groups and brainstorm together. A couple things to keep in mind…creating a digital teacher community does not have to just be through Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. Or if conclude that those are the only platforms that are easy to use and access to continuously engage with, how would you improve on what we have? How can we ask more engaging, more inclusive questions and gather even more helpful and useful resources for you as classroom teachers to use through these common social media platforms?

Or if inspiration strikes you…go crazy and come with a totally new and different platform that we need to build to make it a perfect resources for you…I’m not in IT, building it is not my problem.

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Warm up brainstorm…

How would you move one of the Nelson-Atkins giant shuttlecocks from one spot to another (does not have to be a specific location or distance) without using any tools?

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Brainstorm time…

How would you use a digital teaching community?
What would you want from the digital resources provided?
What platform would you like to use to access the digital community?

So before we start with our real brainstorm. Take a look at the bullet pointed brainstorm questions on the slide as guidance for your brainstorm with your group. To reiterate, there are no bad ideas during a brainstorm. We want to hear how, when, where and why you’d use digital resources for your own professional development, classroom engagement, or curriculum development. These don’t even have to be fully formed plans. They can just be big picture ideas that need a little more time to simmer and develop.

If I ever get struck in a brainstorm I like to think of ideas in three categories: the practical solution, the emotional solution and the moonshot solution. The practical can be a good starting point to start getting your creative thoughts flowing and build up to the more complex brainstorm ideas from there.

After about 20 or so minutes we’ll share out what we came up with.

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Share out

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Thank you!

Contact info:�Hallie McCormick

Coordinator for School and Educator Programs

hmccormick@nelson-atkins.org

https://www.facebook.com/NelsonAtkinsEducators/