Chapter 9: What the Future Holds

As we finish our summer of studying The Connected Educator I hope that each of you have learned things that will be useful as you build your personal learning networks. I debated what question to post for this last chapter because there are so many areas that we could address in this chapter. Ultimately, I decided to just throw it out to the group. You decide what to post for the last chapter.

You can summarize what you have learned - what you will use - what you will choose to NOT use,

OR you can address the changes you will make in relation to the section titled Learning 2.0: Four Core Components

OR you can answer the Questions for the Change Agent in You (pg 143 print)

OR you can on page 144 (print) after the last change agent question - it starts with "Although we have done this work, we are continuing to learn."

OR you can choose your own unique topic. Just let the group know what you are choosing to do.

Since we are so close to the end of summer, let's try to finish all posts before August 1st. Some folks are behind in posting, so if you need more time, just let me know.

Chapter 8: Transforming Leadership for a Connected World

Hi all...I just realized that I should have posted this chapeter's question yesterday. I have been really busy for the last couple days so..please bear with me. I will post the question by tomorrow morning.


Again..l am sorry for forgetting to post the question on time, I will try to be better next time.

This chapter talks about school (teacher/student/principal) leaders and how more schools are moving from traditional to transitional leadership where everyone takes a role in moving the school forward.

I am interested in 3 lines on page 132 (print). "Teacher leaders are first expert teacher learners..." "Teacher leadership is not about power itself but about mobilizing other teachers' potential to improve performance." And "Teacher leadership occurs when a teacher shares with other teachers what works (or hasn't worked) in her or his own classroom in an effort to improve performance for all the students in the school."

So...let's practice being expert learners by setting up blogs to talk about what works or doesn't work in the classroom (or to talk about any topic you want). If you already have a blog - make a blog post about a topic of your choice, tweet and share it with the group. (Also...feel free to share any tips for blogging with the group). [My first tip is use a URL shortener to make blog URLs more manageable in tweets and posts. You can use google to find one.]

Sandy...you might investigate doing a video blog since you are our resident "video expert"

MaryRose...please share your experiences using blogs.

There are many blogs that you can use. Here are two that you might want to try.

We have been using Blogger all summer and I really like it. Here is the website and the support page for the information about getting started.
http://www.blogger.com/home https://support.google.com/blogger/

MaryRose has been using Edublogs. You might want to investigate this one. Again...I have included the support information.
http://edublogs.org/. http://help.edublogs.org/getting-started-with-edublogs/

Chapter 7: Sustaining the Momentum

This chapter talks about setting up and maintaining a group or professional learning community. While I think that some of us may be ready to move to this level, many of us are still in the explore/learn mode. We have spent 2 chapters exploring tools and sharing them with our group. Now it is time to explore one more tool. Let's all look at Twitter this week. For an intro, take a look at http://www.teachhub.com/why-every-teacher-should-join-twitter for some very good reasons why all teachers should be on Twitter and for links to articles on how to use Twitter in the classroom. If you unfamiliar with Twitter, take a look at https://support.twitter.com/ for all you need to know about Twitter and how to get started.  If you do not have a Twitter account, go ahead and set up an account. Once you have an account, you need to choose some folks to follow. There are many ways to do this, but I think the best way to find quality folks to follow is to look at hashtags that interest you and choose others that post to these hashtags. Here is a list of 300+ hashtags to look at: http://www.cybraryman.com/edhashtags.html . Choose a few and go to the "discover" page on Twitter and search...you will see the people/groups who post to this tag and you can choose a few to follow. (My policy is that I will follow someone, but if they spend a lot of time tweeting about things that are not educationally interesting to me I will drop them without apology. For example...I heard Kevin Honeycutt speak earlier this summer. He was an excellent speaker, but he tweets about everything from what he is having for dinner, to where he is located every minute of the day. This is a waste of time, so I stopped following him pretty quickly).

Once you have chosen at least 5 people/groups to follow, start reading and learning. If you are already on Twitter, just report on the folks you already following. At the end of the week, report back to the group. What is your twitter handle? (mine is @angynorthern). Who did you choose to follow? What have you learned? How can you use this tool both professionally and in the classroom?

As we have seen during the last couple chapters, it takes a while to learn a new tool and to become comfortable using it. So...don't give up as you learn this one. Keep exploring and "lurking"...just reading posts for now. We will dive a little deeper in the next chapter.

Chapter 6 -- Building Your Connected Learning Community

Let's continue our exploration of online tools. Choose one of these two options:

1. Choose one of the tools we didn't get to in the last chapter, explore and report back to the group.  OR
2. Continue your exploration of the tool you explored in the last chapter. Learn more and report back to the group.  

We will save Twitter for Chapter 7. (If you have a Twitter account please tell me your twitter handle in your post this time).