mrcpennyforyourthoughts

While I am still in the process of digesting and crafting my thoughts to post about the Global Education Conference, I want to address the last few ideas we have been asked to blog for EDL 7510 as a “wrap-up” for the course.  Overall, I found the personal/professional learning network “growth experience” quite beneficial.  I write “personal/professional” learning network because I can not distinguish between the two.  I have been using Twitter for only professional networking:  ideas about technology integration, educational policy updates, etc.  I will continue to use Twitter for those reasons and not to explore what Justin Bieber had for breakfast or what Lady Gaga’s latest fashion statement is.  I will reduce my RSS feeds to just the few that I enjoy reading, and same with the blogs that I have been following.   Here is the link to my mind map:

http://www.mindomo.com/view.htm?m=d9877ce7329544bfb76e4f09dfff9086I used my Google Reader and Google Buzz before this class started, and will continue to do so, but with some additional subscriptions.  For pod casts, I will continue to use iTunes and iTunesU, especially for those related to language learning.

Through my exploration of Twitter I have found some amazing educators “to follow,” and I have learned so much from their ideas and posts.  Through presenting at the Global Education Conference, I was re-connected with an acquaintance at a neighbor school, and we have been communicating to try and get a Twitter chat room started for language teachers.  The PLN assignment has been very helpful to me, and I look forward to continuing the aforementioned tools for my personal AND  professional learning.

I had the pleasure of logging on to Elluminate today to listen to my first session of the 2010 online Global Education Conference. The 1:00 pm session I attended (virtually) was actually one of the keynote speakers, Homa Tavangar. Her title was Growing Up Digital. She spoke about universality- how do we connect with each other, and how do we continually open ourselves up to the possibilities of connecting with more and more people in different ways each day. She challenged the participants to develop relationships with “more than a screen.” Homa also asked us to think about the “golden rule” as a universal principal that applies to all humans- regardless of culture or creed. She connected the “golden rule” to the core values that many schools are adopting, and presented the question- “What will success look like in 10-20 years?” A big part of her answer to that question is global citizenship and awareness. She used the World Cup as a way to connect students- even very young students to the idea of “something bigger” than themselves. She also talked about the concept of “glocalization”- serving locally and globally and how some schools are using the Millenium Development Goals to create project-based based learning projects. Millenium Development Goals are goals set by the United Nations to drastically diminish extreme poverty by 2015. Homa also mentioned several ways schools are adopting and encouraging diversity- international alliances of parents and students, international book clubs and after-school programs that encourage cultural diversity and inclusion. Her final “take away” was Do One Thing!
The session was 55 minutes long, and I stayed for the question and answer portion- so definitely not a huge time commitment. There were 50-54 participants during the session- which I thought was pretty good for the middle of the day. I am looking forward to giving my presentation tomorrow, and attending more sessions on Thursday and Friday.
Log on and see for yourself- there are so many sessions I wish I could attend!!!

http://www.globaleducationconference.com/

Don’t you love how sometime you just have those moments in life when all you can do is laugh? I was debating last week on when to post my blog about live professional development sessions since I am presenting this week at the Global Education Conference. I decided to hold off until this week, but this experience that I am about to share was too good to wait until my next post. I had been receiving emails from the coordinator of the conference about how to log on to a training session to find out about the different presentation tools in Elluminate (the online forum for the conference.)
The link sent to me in the email did not work when I tried it, and instead took me to an “empty” Elluminate room. I was a little frustrated, so I just closed my laptop and went home. When I got home, I opened up my laptop and then walked out of the kitchen for a minute, when I walked back into the kitchen, I heard voices coming from my computer. The Elluminate room was still open, but now there were other people logged on and chattting. As I approached my computer I realized that the people in the room were speaking Spanish! I ended up accidentally logging into an Elluminate training session in Spanish! I sat down to my computer as the moderator and other participant were talking to me in Spanish and asking me questions in the chat window. I responded right away, en Español without hesitation and proceeded to listen to the moderator discuss how he was going to conduct the training. The other participant was from Argentina and I loved hearing the inflection in her voice ; the Italian-lilt of Argentinian Spanish always makes me smile. The moderator ended up conducting the training in both languages, but it was so funny to me how of all places, I ended up in that chat room. What really struck me, though, was that the moderator truly exhibits a global awareness not many can claim- when we were online together he was in Kansas City, speaking Spanish but is helping to coordinate the eastern Europe division of the Global Education Conference because he also speaks Russian. WOW! I was so impressed – talk about being globally connected!!! Online professional development sessions truly can open up those global interactions, and I love that! I am very excited about presenting on Wednesday, and will have another entry for you following the conference!

As I have stated in prior posts, I was quite the skeptic when it came to Twitter as a professional development tool, but I have to say, I have enjoyed exploring it over the past few weeks in our EDL class. With the help of a colleague at school who has encouraged me to follow some key educational “movers and shakers,” I have found others’ Tweets valuable, and if anything have spurred me on to explore some things I had not thought of or seen in the past. Often I do not act on the new ideas I garner from the Tweets immediately, but I might go back later when I have more time to explore. I am interested in how I can expand my professional Twitter network, because starting a Twitter chat group for language teachers very much interests me. I guess my question for avid Twitter-ers / Twitter-ites is how is the best way to reach out to other professionals in your subject area? I’m not yet savvy enough, nor have I had the time to fully delve into finding people that would help me professionally on Twitter. Overall, I have no complaints about my professional Twitter experiences, and will most likely keep my account for professional development and networking after this semester.
Bye-Bye fellow Tweeters!

Like many educators and individuals, I have been growing my personal and professional network online rapidly over the past 2 years; however, the other day I was reminded of an online community (probably one of my first) that I joined four years ago. I received an update from a Yahoo group I joined for TPRS (Total Physical Response Storytelling) language teachers about some new resources that had been added. In a moment of curiosity during planning period I logged onto the group and found some wonderful new additions to my substitute folder (for emergency plans in the instance I am absent without notice). This experience reminded me not to neglect some of the “older” networks and connections that we may have established in the past. It is easy to be overwhelmed and consumed by the newness and novelty of Twitter, NINGs, and RSS feeds, but let’s not discount the value of other modes of sharing resources and best practices that we may have been utilizing for several years!

Yesterday I had the pleasure of listening to and participating in a live Elluminate session sponsored by Edutopia, Elluminate and FutureofEducation.com. The forum was organized by educational leader and thinker Steve Hardagon. Each presenter was asked the same four questions and was given 13 minutes to present his/her views and then 2-3 minutes were alloted for questions from the participants (who were also chatting their thoughts as the presenters were speaking). I hate that I was only able to listen for 45 minutes because the conversations that were milling about the chat room and being discussed by the presenters were conversations that need to go beyond the confines of the Elluminate room and into every classroom, home, teachers’ lounge and faculty meeting in America. The title of the forum was “Elevating the Education Reform Dialogue.” My point is that we need to elevate the dialogue to the point that all around us are hearing what teachers, parents, students and administrators are saying. While our voices are getting louder and the conversations are happening more frequently about what we need to be doing to make the changes to improve learning in our schools, are the right people hearing us? Are we making ourselves known?
Here are a few of the main points I found most valuable from listening yesterday afternoon:
1. We need to ask teachers to make the focus be on pedagogy and we need to bring our students back into the decision making process when it comes to their learning (from Alfie Kohn’s comments)
2. All problems in our schools are NOT the result of bad teachers, and so much negative dialogue is hurting teachers who are good! Teachers deserve so much more respect than what we are seeing in our schools and in our society today.
And, my favorite quote from Diane Ravitch’s presentation– “Principals should be master teachers.”
3. When it come to the future of education, there are many paths we can choose- we just have to choose the direction.
We all need to be teachers and learners together in the classroom with our students, and include students in the learning process. (from Deborah Meier’s presentation).
All in all, it was a great way to spend 45 minutes of my day in thought about my craft, and I strongly encourage you to think about your voice– are you elevating the dialogue at your school?