Becoming a 21st Century Learner

Since the March ITLL session with George Couros I have had the pleasure of reading so many great reflections on innovation, its involvement in the classroom, and what everyone’s thoughts on this concept have been.  I have been having trouble narrowing down what I was going to reflect on since this year has been a tremendous year for professional learning for me.  But here we go… narrowing it down. I have decided to reflect on my experiences on my learning of Twitter; a platform I have recently learned to love.

My first experience with Twitter was extremely confusing. I just didn’t “get it”. I had seen facebook posts from former colleagues about their tweets and retweets and I wondered what all the fuss was about. So I signed up. I was still so very confused. I had no followers.  What were these @ symbols for? I would check my account every few weeks…still no followers. At this point my Twitter account fell by the wayside.

The next experience I had with Twitter happened this year. In September I was told a few students from our school would be attending a S.T.E.A.M (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) program.  I was already familiar with the concept of S.T.E.A.M and volunteered to attend the professional development. It was here that I actually started to get the point of twitter (in regards to education and business). It was about being connected. For me Twitter became a platform that I could learn from.

With this new found knowledge of Twitter I decided to give it an honest try. I had attempted to create a second twitter account to use with my students. That account just didn’t seem to work out right and so I am currently only using my personal account. I am still learning the ins and outs of Twitter, but I find that every day I am learning so much from being connected to educators in my province and around the world.

One thing that had really stuck with me from the session with George Couros was that he was introducing twitter to a group of educators not simply to have these educators implement this new platform in their classrooms. He was introducing it as a way for educators to become 21st century learners through collaboration with fellow educators across the globe. The scariest (and the best) part of learning twitter and becoming more of a 21st century learner myself is that I don’t know the answers to all of the questions. I can now show my students that it is alright not to know something right away, but what matters is that you look for the answers.

Danielle Eppert

Weston School

Cluster 2010

 

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