The purpose of this blog today is to convince teachers to start an online professional learning network this summer. Many wonderful bloggers have written on the same subject and I started to just give a link to those sites, but instead I want to share my own personal PLN story. My journey begins with a strong desire to learn and find ways to do my job better. People being lifelong learners is something I believe in with all my heart. I ENJOY learning and I think the path to creating a PLN will be rewarding for all educators who love to learn. If someone is in education and doesn't love to learn, something is seriously wrong, right?
Back to my journey . . . I want to discover new things and find out about what other educators are doing. The school where I work offers plenty to do without planning any extras. Many opportunities abound to tackle behavior, help families and trouble-shoot technology. At times I feel like a highly educated repair man more than anything else. What happened to lifelong learning, teaching, guiding teachers through observations, helping design lessons, creating better math interventions, doing math interventions, and transforming our school? I long for that kind of progress. The timing hasn't been quite right to begin a Phd and an online degree from a faraway school doesn't feel engaging to me. Instead for now, I've turned to Twitter. I had heard about people using Twitter for professionals reasons rather than reading posts about the latest trend in shoe styles. So I signed up and started following different educators. I looked for principals that were writing about experiences and best practices. I quickly found that Twitter was a place to drive traffic to a blog. I couldn't believe all the great writing I found on educational blogs. I even started reading a math blog from Finland! I felt invigorated about professional learning again. No one was complaining and everyone was writing about great experiences going on in schools. Even though I thought I was doing all I could, I discovered that I really was only keeping the boat afloat rather than actively guiding the ship.
Daily life in school can pull someone in many directions. Students are a challenge to manage at times and the constant grind of the school day wearing. I like to compare it to an actor being on stage 6 hours a day 5 days a week with an audience that can't leave.
An infusion of connections with similar professionals fighting the same battles is very refreshing! Educators who tackle the same issues and make progress offer hope that problems can be solved. So I started reading Tweets and going to links, but I still wasn't fully connected. I thought Twitter was about developing a group with the same interests and communicating regularly. Then I discovered the hastag #gaed and the experience on Twitter became a different thing altogether. Every Thursday night at 8:00 PM I jump on Twitter and talk with regulars who show up in a feed on a particular topic related to education. There is even a parent at our school that is a teacher at another school on the hashtag --someone I've personally met. These people comment on my posts, I on theirs, and new people start following me. One day I even received a tweet from State Superintendent, John Barge! My wife, a librarian, posted about books and received replies from award-winning authors. Never before has the ability to connect and communicate with the source of information been so great. My daughter was doing a research paper and read an article. She then emailed the researcher and received detailed information in return. Because I value learning, discovering the power of online learning is exciting to me.
Next, I decided that I wanted a blog so that I could truly communicate ideas and learning. I talk with many superstar educators by reading their blogs and commenting back to them. The flow of ideas is so powerful it could actually make a difference with a challenging issue being worked out the next day. My blog over the last few months has been directed at motivation and I've come to the conclusion that people are motivated by what makes them happy. Of course that seems really simple, but that's really it. Watching a favorite program on TV, sitting on the porch with family, going to a bluegrass festival, reading or whatever it may be . . . Learning is what makes me happy and it's why I became a teacher. I BELIEVE in life long learning and I can still become better at most anything in my 40s and beyond. My motivation for using Twitter is that my Professional Learning Network (PLN) will help me learn. Another motivation for writing a blog is to learn to be a better writer. It's inspiring to see people discussing how they are making improvements in their professional lives that make them better educators and leaders. People on Goodreads sharing about books, teachers sharing experiences with BYOT, principals sharing experiences of working with parents, and of course, what to do about common core.
Still reading? That means maybe I'm making a convincing case for starting a Professional Learning Network! I suggest setting up 4 sites on the internet. A blog to write about learning and problem solving, Pinterist to share visuals, Edmodo for parents, and a Twitter account to connect with professionals. The first pledge has to be to connect as a professional and share ideas just as much as borrowing them. Be a producer of knowledge, not just a consumer!
Read the following link and watch the TED video.
Think like a leader, because everyday teachers lead 20 to 30 students into the future. Malcom Gladwell's book, Outliners, begins with a story about an exceptional community of healthy people. A community virtually absent of heart disease. Medical researchers landed on this community to figure out how it had happened. Surely it was the diet, exercise, or genetics. What they found out is that this community made up of immigrants from the same town in Italy, were a tight knit community that never stopped communicating with each other. They had more civic organizations than the average community and families supported each other. My professional learning network will become a version of that group for me. Yes, it will mainly be online but that is the reality of the 21st century. It seems like a healthy community to me!
One more link to help you get started Tips for Twitter.
Good Luck and you can follow me @stanlearn on Twitter.
No comments:
Post a Comment