What social media platform do I feel best supports engagement with my professional development? Why?How do I use social media to enhance your professional development? Why?
The ability to respond flexibly to a wide range of trends and student needs means that institutions need to support teachers’ learning on-demand, using collaborative and organisational approaches as much as the more formalised approaches. (AlaMutka, 2009) from (Melhuish, page 24).
We live and work in a digital environment and whether we choose to or not, technology is thrust in front of us on a daily basis. Who would have thought that we could be reading our emails off our television screen? Or using our phones to be connected at all times to whatever online web sites, social media groups, news, professional learning communities for work and social activities.
While I don’t consider myself to be a proficient online communicator, I am pleasantly surprised that when I do sit down and reflect on how I use social media to enhance my professional development, I actually do participate and use it often. Being on the Mind Lab course has opened up teaching and learning opportunities interacting in online communities. My CoP has grown exponentially from predominately being part of face to face groups to moving within various online communities.
There are quite a few social media platforms that I use to support and engage in professional development. Within my Facebook community I belong to the NZ Teachers (Primary) Teachers page, #NZReadaloud, Google Apps NZ Primary, ILE and Collaborative Teaching NZ, plus I am a member of four other private groups in a non teaching capacity mainly for health and wellbeing.
I have also become more proactive within the Google+ community, with The Mind Lab November Intake, Google Apps for Education, Google Apps Educators, edchatNZ, Hack your class, and Living + another out of school Hauora group for health, happiness and mindfulness to balance my home/work life.
I am an a participator on twitter rather than just an observer. Asking questions and sharing on twitter has helped me immensely with my Mind Lab assignments and resources for my class. From participating in the twitter conversation, we now use Edmodo in our classroom programme. Edmodo is an easy way to get students connected so they can safely collaborate, get and stay organized, and access assignments, grades, and school work. Some of the students have voluntarily joined up their parents so that they can view the work they are doing in class.
Having had to set up a reflective blog for The Mind Lab course, and become a blogger of sorts has helped me put into practice what I expect the children in my class to do. My Teaching as Inquiry focus this year is to use blogging for reflective practice, sharing work and seeking and giving feedback to and from others to see if this encourages more collaboration through critical and deeper thinking, when writing and discussing work. Hopefully, the children will gain a wider audience which will bridge the gap between school and home and encourage parents to participate in their child’s learning by engaging in comments and giving feedback.
Educators using online communities for their professional learning to stay connected with colleagues, students and parents become part of a “transformative and powerful” movement. (Office of Ed Tech). We want our students to have agency and self direction over their learning, we too, must do the same.
“We know that effective adult learning hinges upon the extent to which learners have agency over the process …. that self-driven learning is vital for sustainable learning, and increasingly this may be facilitated flexibly using online technologies. (Melhuish, page 24)
So far I have been using it for my professional development and resourcing for classroom activities. I know that I need to be even more proactive and participate in online chats and transfer this to classroom activities. This will happen in due course as and when I see the need for it for myself as a learner and myself as a learner amongst other learners.
I liked this video which was published on September 18, 2013. Its an interview with educators about the importance of being "connected" in order to be effective teachers and leaders. It was created as part of Connected Educators Month
References
Source: Office of Ed Tech. (2013, Sep 18). Connected Educators. [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=216&v=K4Vd4JP_DB8
Melhuish, K.(2013). Online social networking and its impact on New Zealand educators’professional learning. Master Thesis. The University of Waikato. Retrived on 05 May, 2015 from http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/bitstream/han...
I really liked your post. It has shown me new ways in which I can engage in Social media for professional interaction. Do you find that now that you have it set up it works well for you? Do you spend less time looking for new things as you are now engaged and active within the interactions that you have. I find that it is sometimes difficult to find exactly what you are needing to have interaction with. I can find a lot of things on the internet which are helpful, but some of out of context and not within the scope I can work with.
ReplyDeleteHow are you finding your children's learning when they are engaged in learning through social media, is it providing better results/active engaged learners, from each activity. As I've found children need to see the overall outcome of learning each new skill, so I was wondering if in your experience this has helped.
technically I am still a beginning teacher, and I am currently working only 2 days a week, which is what I find hard about all these great ideas. As I've posted on another post, I think social media can be amazing, if well used, and engage learners with more meaning. I'm just unsure of how to use in my practice.
Thanks for your feedback Tracy. There is such a lot of information and sharing out there and it is important to filter what suits you. I surf a lot of sites and take out of it what I can adapt to suit my needs. The students are enjoying Edmodo, where they upload their learning and have conversations about particular topics. The blogging is a work in progress, as long as we make time to read and comment on each other's work and it is starting to improve. It would be difficult for you only working 2 days a week to utilise and action all your ideas. I think that you just have to start using it and develop and adapt as you go. Having the students sharing work online opens up a whole new audience for them rather than just showing in exercise books or classroom walls.
DeleteHey Lynette,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your blog. You have obviously embraced social media and can certainly see the merits of its application. I teach tertiary level Business at a PTE. The industry has been slow to really embrace this technology. So as the only teacher from my college on the mindlab, I was given the lead to experiment. My area of interest has been adding a back-channel to the formal lecture format. I was initially sold on Twitter and successfully got a back channel up and running. I have had great experience backchanneling with Twitter myself, however, it wasn't after integration I could see many of its flaws. One being that it does not effectively thread or aggregate data in a very useful manner. I too have recently been experimenting with Edmodo. From my initial trials it appears to be a great application for adding a collaborative layer. I encourage students to actively involve themselves within the back-channel to become more active in the co-creation of knowledge. What I like about it, is similar to Twitter, students can come around a hashtag or classroom, and log into that space anonymously, which adds a very interesting layer. It does open itself up to a few behaviour issues, but if the actors remain respectful it appears to cancel out a layer of group-think (Janis, 1972). I use SPINXO (http://www.spinxo.com/) to generate random names, and ask the students to respect the anonymity ethos of contributions. This may be more difficult with younger learners to cultivate, especially with teenagers, who sometimes like to flout the general ethos of the community.