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 21^st century learners through collaboration with fellow educators across the globe. The scariest (and the best) part of learning twitter and becoming more of a 21^st 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

 

Well…here I go. My first crack at writing a blog entry.

I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about becoming a ‘blogger’ before. It seemed like a fun and trendy thing to do as I was finishing up my Education degree. THEN… I thought about it a little more. What would I even write about?! It was also at this point that I remembered that even though every year I had a New Year’s resolution to keep a journal… I would write in it once or twice and end up tearing the pages out because I didn’t want to go back and read what I had written one day and think about how silly my thoughts were. SO it turns out I wasn’t so keen on becoming a blogger after all…you know writing that could be accessed by anyone and would be much more permanent than pages I could later on rip out of a journal.

Anyway I’m sitting here typing (and biting my nails a lot due to nervous feelings of this being read by my colleagues) and thinking that this too is something I am doing that is pushing me out of my comfort zone!

My lovely comfort zone…the comfort zone I might have been content in remaining in before attending our first session with George. Since that day in March I have 1) stopped using Instagram to creep on people ( I have now made 3 posts!) 2) joined the world of Twitter AND 3) am thinking, very seriously, about starting a classroom blog.

I had recently told someone that I was fine with ‘being maxed out with technology’. I was fine with using what I know and not bothering to learn anything new unless it was completely necessary. After reading George’s book I realized that I’m not okay with this. I don’t want to be left behind. I want to ‘keep up with technology’ and use it to be more innovative in my teaching. Don’t get me wrong…I use technology everyday and love the projects that I am able to do with my class. I’m not even sure why I felt like I was okay with closing my mindset to technology. It seems a little ridiculous now that I think about it!

Now I realize that I can blog about what I know and what I know is…teaching Grade 2! I read other people’s blogs when looking for ideas for my own classroom. Maybe it’s time to return the ‘favour’ and share things that I do in my class with others. Reading The Innovator’s Mindset has made me think about many things. I have revisited my desire to continue my own learning. It also made me think about teachers who keep their best ideas to themselves. I want to be a teacher who pays it forward and continues to learn from a network of really great people!

 

Danielle Shrumm

Weston School

Cluster 2010