"How has the internet impacted your own personal learning?"
Walsall Library Presentation Key by Black Country Museums available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
This sounds trite, but the internet has changed my teaching life. When I first started teaching (2002, my first teaching rounds, 2006 my first class), sure I used the internet. I would look up teaching resources, images, animations, lesson ideas... the usual. I was pretty "techy", and I knew how to find what I needed. In the last couple of years, I started using a lot of web 2.0 and social media, but not for my teaching. For some reason, the blatantly obvious connection between my personal and professional usage had escaped me.
2011 was the year it all changed.
It began simply enough, as many things do. I signed up for a new twitter account. As you would know from my previous post, in addition to being a teacher, I am also a photographer. I had signed up for Twitter not long after starting my business, but I only followed a couple of people, and never saw the benefits. This time though, I started following people. I spent a couple of days building up my network, starting by following people who were using the #ultranet hashtag, following the people they followed, and so on (I now follow 196). The information that I had pulled toward me was relevant, interesting, and on so many occasions, exactly what I needed at that very moment.
I am, however, not the first or only person to think that getting information from Twitter is like trying to drink from a fire hydrant. I needed some way of filtering out the junk, and more importantly, saving the gems. I downloaded Tweetdeck, which helped immensely. I created a few columns - #edchat, #vicpln, #Ultranet, which were filled with people sharing great resources. However I needed a way to file it all. I created a Diigo account, a readitlater account and set up my Google Reader account (which, like many tools, I had used for years but never for teaching) properly with folders. I have blogged in more detail about how I use these here.
Now that I manage the information effectively, I can honestly say that Twitter is the source of the best professional learning I have ever done (and at present I am including my M.Ed in that - the quality of info shared via Twitter is THAT high!).
Without the internet, this year alone, I would have missed out on:
I am, however, not the first or only person to think that getting information from Twitter is like trying to drink from a fire hydrant. I needed some way of filtering out the junk, and more importantly, saving the gems. I downloaded Tweetdeck, which helped immensely. I created a few columns - #edchat, #vicpln, #Ultranet, which were filled with people sharing great resources. However I needed a way to file it all. I created a Diigo account, a readitlater account and set up my Google Reader account (which, like many tools, I had used for years but never for teaching) properly with folders. I have blogged in more detail about how I use these here.
Now that I manage the information effectively, I can honestly say that Twitter is the source of the best professional learning I have ever done (and at present I am including my M.Ed in that - the quality of info shared via Twitter is THAT high!).
Without the internet, this year alone, I would have missed out on:
- The Age Digital Literacy Seminar
- Stever Hargardon's Teacher 2.0 Professional Learning Day
- A video conference with a NASA astronaut
- A massive number of great blogs
- Enrolling in the Master of Education
- Countless teaching ideas & resources
- Many more things!
Awesome! So glad all of this happened for you!
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