Wrapping up the first day of our Collaborative Learning Plan. Here are some quick thoughts.
It’s taken quite a bit of my attention to follow the group attending the conference today. Not sure if it is realistic for other teachers at AC to do the same while they are in the middle of their work day. On the other hand, if we divide up the work, “crowd source” the monitoring of events, couldn’t that simplify it for everyone, even me? Maybe departments could follow just their colleague’s tweets and reflections?
Indeed feedback from at least one teacher today, “I just don’t get the point of Twitter,” means that many of our teachers aren’t there yet. How do we encourage them to be open? How do we get them to try?
Not everyone from our team at the conference is tweeting yet. It really is just a habit of mind, and I know that some might feel that it distracts from their experience of the workshop. Should we push them? How do we encourage them to do more?
We’ve asked for a minimum of one reflection for the entire week, while also encouraging as many as one reflection per day. For today I’ve seen three of them. You can check them out below. Some may still choose to get one in before they good to bed tonight, the team is out for dinner now. I’m very proud of, and impressed by the reflections each person delivered given their individual level of comfort with technology and shared reflection. Obviously we wouldn’t do this now, as we’re midstream, but when is the write time to begin to encourage even higher quality reflections from everyone?
Personally, I feel connected to the conference in a way that I most definitely wouldn’t have had I not been following through with our plan. I think there is definite value in this. I think I still need to sort out how to bring it all together in a way that will truly stick. Perhaps the reflections will help do that?
Have you done something similar at your school? What was that experience like?
Image credit: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Speed_roller_skating_warmup.jpg
2 thoughts to “Gaining Momentum”
I wonder if they saw how Flipboard can curate all your tweets into a magazine, or how TweetDeck can curate multiple threads at once if it would make more sense. Part of staying alive and awake is having frequent spurts of divergent thinking, having to decipher multiple viewpoints, and perhaps having to interpret meaning from only 140 characters. My daily ride in the elevator in my building can take up to five minutes of my day, that’s two to three quick reads through short articles. That’s 35 to 40 minutes a week, up to 30 hours of elevator riding a year – more than a day of each year is spent in the elevator! So I burn through articles, most of the curated through Twitter feeds. I take in a wide scope from thinkers that have even wider scopes – Stephen Downes, Henry Jenkins, Amy Burvall, the d.School, High Tech High, or however you filter your feed.
And then, there are the podcasts to and from school, 15 minutes each way, that’s…
I’m with you, and some of my team is ready for that, but others need the baby steps. I have a great sense of where they are, too because I feel like I was there in the same way. Mabye not in my head at the time, because though I thought I believed it, I didn’t practice it. So there are some mental hurdles to overcome. But then, you gain momentum, and it happens. I think that’s really what we have to be experts at. Not the specific tools and methods, that will change, but the management of change.