Dipping My Toe In

What are some of the ways that educators and professionals are connecting and sharing their learning? What can you do during this class and after it is over to maintain your connections and networks, to further develop your knowledge, experience and skills?

Twitter

I am very new to Twitter. In fact, I signed up for Twitter only a few weeks ago and only because it was a requirement of this course. Since then I read an article that state 6 out of 10 teachers are using social platforms like Twitter to enhance their teaching. So for this week of inquiry I spent a lot of time searching through Twitter and trying to understand how it can help me develop a learning community. 

I have realized that certain hashtags that I assumed would be in use or relevant to me are, in fact, not.  #sd23 is not that active yet @sd23 is. #sd23learn has more info but isn't much more active, whereas #sd23learns (the s on the end changes everything) is much more active and full of information I am interested in. I am definitely learning the importance of getting the exact hashtag! I learned that #stem works for my purposes but #steam (science, technology, engineering, art and math) does not. I have yet to figure out why or a pattern to these trends so that will be part of my learning for the next few months. My thinking is that I will create a list of hashtags that work for me and check regularly.

Checking these hastags though led me to interesting people in my district who are focusing on things like coding, design thinking, and technology that I am interested in so now I know to follow people like @kleckner_SD23, @_grahamjohnson, @c_durley, and @amber_hartwell. I am keen on following people in my district because I understand the context in which they work and teach. It offers me the reliability and authority I am looking for when using a social platform such as this. It also lets me get great advice from them because they know my context too.  I think for next year I will stick to local and then when I am feeling confident, I will start to broaden my searches beyond my district.

I noticed that searching for specific products such as @microbit_edu, @scratch, @sphero, @spheroedu or @raspberrypi all produced excellent results and they were very active accounts with heaps of instructional or inspirational videos to keep my coding heart happy. I could see myself doing a weekly check in of those.  https://twitter.com/microbit_edu

SD23 Library Learning Commons Professional Learning Community

We have an active learning community for teacher led by librarians in our district. They met four times this year, set goals based on the Leading Learning document, and took turns presenting out what they are doing. Though I am not a TL, they have welcomed all teachers to their meetings so I have been going. Usually 5 TLs present each meeting and the topic vary as do the size and scope of their libraries. The TLs were refreshingly open about where they are on their learning journey and what their goals were. They happily share their resources as well. I have been thrilled to see such an active, positive, and supportive community. I plan to continue attending even though I am not a TL so that I can continue to learn and shape my practice as an LAT. I sincerely hope that it is still flourishing when I get to be a TL!

 LM-NET

I was introduced to this network in my last few courses and loved how the "great brain" worked. I did not sign up for it as I am not currently a TL and didn't want to get heaps of daily emails about a job I don't have. However, I plan to connect to it and use the archive function when needed. 

http://www.lm-net.info/