The End is Just the Beginning...

Can you tell it's graduation time?  As I peruse though my Facebook wall I see all these sappy posts about graduation.  Parents wondering where the time has went, students enjoying every last minute with their friends, siblings wondering what life will be like without their brother or sister in the house this fall.  Everything is changing.

The world of education is changing.  This years seniors in our district were the first to graduate that were given a MacBook to use throughout the year.  The education that happened in our district this year looked different that many of our teachers could have imagined just a few short years ago.  Change is here.  Change will now be constant.  Change is our new way of life.

When I volunteered to take this course just a few short months ago I had no idea how important it was going to end up being.  A few weeks after I signed up I was told that I would be facilitating our districts first online professional development course.  So the first day of my class about online teaching, was my first day teaching an online class!  So the timing wasn't ideal, but that's how those things go.  And since then, I have found out that I will have the opportunity to teach an online class next year for seniors, as well as continue my eLearning Coach position with an emphasis on helping out the other teachers that are doing online and blended courses.

So the content in this course has been very valuable to me right where I am today, as well as looking toward the future.  While I have taken many online courses over the past 10 years, I hadn't ever really put much thought into how to design a course.  So even the most basic information that was given was very enlightening and will help me be a better educator as I enter the next school year.

The other part of this learning process that I loved was the ability to use many of the tools that I tell teachers about all the time, from the student perspective.  As the "tech person," I'm constantly finding tools and showing teachers how to set them up and use them. But to actually get to use them myself to create or complete an assignment was a great opportunity.

So now summer is here, and the sappy graduation posts will subside soon enough.  However, the teachers know that even summer "vacation" is full of planning for the next year.  So here I go!  The end of this course is just the beginning of my planning time.  And I'm so grateful to have this new knowledge and set of tools to use along the way!

Tweet Tweet!

Social media is everywhere.  Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Vine, Instagram, and others are changing the way we communicate and share our lives with others.  Sometimes I can hardly remember what I did with all my free time before I jumped on the social media bandwagon!  And while there is a part of me that doesn't like that it has taken away from the more personal forms of communication, I honestly don't want to imagine my life without it.  Facebook, in particular, gives me the opportunity to stay connected to a lot of people that I would lose touch with without it.

So how do I feel about it being in the classroom?  It's clearly already there, so why not use it to our advantage!  I don't care how diligent you are about monitoring your students, they will find a way to check their newsfeed if they want to.  They will tweet during class, or post a picture to Instagram and you will never even know.  This is how they live.  It is part of who they are.  And I am a believer in making connections by meeting them where they are.  Because the more "at home" they feel in the classroom, the more learning they are going to do.

However, I will not turn a blind eye to the potential risks that are involved.  Anytime that teachers "open" their classrooms to the outside world they are letting go of a bit of control.  And also when teaches connect with students through social media there may need to be very rigid guidelines to the types of communications that take place.  There may be problems that arise along the way, but I believe if it is done correctly and with some common sense guidelines, it can be a very powerful tool.

A Whole New World of Organization

If you walk into my home, it wouldn't take you long to know that organization is not one of my strong points.  My poor husband tries to help by picking up the clutter around the house and finding a home for it (many times his "home" ends up being the trash can), but much to his dismay, his need to organize hasn't rubbed off on me much in the last 10 years.  I have a lot of stuff, and tend to accumulate more stuff all the time.  I will even admit that from time to time I will watch an episode or two of Hoarders, just to make myself feel a bit better :)

However, when it comes to my digital life, I attempt to do a better job of organizing my "stuff."  Social media is constantly feeding me a stream of information and resources that even though I might not need them today, I see that there is a potential need for them in my future.  So, how to I keep it all straight?

Up until today, I have used Pinterest as a holding pen for all of my professional development information that I find interesting and useful.  I like that I can "pin it" and know that it will be there for me in the future.   I have built a library of resources there that I can pull from quickly which I love.

I am also really liking a new tool that I just tried today which is called Scoop.it.  This is another tool that can be used to curate information about any topic.  What I think is great about it is that you can just give it a few key words and it begins to feed you information that it thinks you would find helpful.  The suggested articles and pages that it brought up for me were fantastic.  Literally within a few minutes I had the beginnings of a library of resources on educational technology and professional development.  So this new tool is quickly becoming a favorite of mine and I think I'll be using it quite frequently in the future.