Here it is, Radical Nation: The first day in our four-day conversation on the nuts-and-bolts of restructuring schools as professional learning communities with Solution Tree authors and school change experts Rick and Becky DuFour.

Interested in joining the conversation?

Then click this link:  Enter Revisiting PLCs at Work Conversation

You might also be interested in this set of directions on how to make digital conversations work for you and this set of directions about how to sign up for a Voicethread account.

If you struggle at all with your own Voicethread login, you can use this generic login that I created this morning:

Username: billguest@wcpss.net

Password: billguest

You’ll find a small box in the bottom left hand corner of the presentation that will let you change to any of a range of generic identity icons.  The only hitch with using this generic login is that only one user is allowed to login under an identity at a time!  If you struggle to get in using the generic login, consider waiting for 20 minutes and then coming back.

Something to know about navigating Voicethread conversations:

While working in a Voicethread conversation, participants can choose to hit the "Play" button at the bottom of any particular slide and watch the conversation around that slide from beginning to end.  That’s probably the best strategy the first time you stop by our conversation with Rick and Becky because you’ll get to hear my opening questions, Rick and Becky’s initial responses, and the thinking of other participants.

As you revisit pages, however----something you should do once or twice over the course of the week to see how conversations are developing----you can click on new icons surrounding the quotes that you are interested in to hear new comments that have been added.  You can also click on individual comments in the "Timeline" bar that appears at the bottom of each slide.

By doing so, you won’t have to listen to every comment every time that you stop by our conversation!  Instead, you can focus your attention on the thoughts of new participants or participants you’re most interested in learning from.

Let’s knock this out of the park, huh?

Take some time in the next four days to add what you know, to allow your thinking to be challenged and to challenge the thinking of others.  Be committed to walking away from this conversation with new information that you can use to push your building forward.

Professional learning communities can be powerful tools for driving change in our buildings, but only when the pieces are laid in place properly---and the first step towards assembling the puzzle is building shared knowledge together.

Voicethread can help us to do that together.