I participated in Connected Educator Month pretty heavily in 2015 since it spoke to one of my central missions/visions as a Technology Integration Specialist: I want to empower educators to take charge of their professional learning by using social media (really, any means necessary...).
After Connected Educator Month was over, I met with teachers who participated from one of my high schools to do a debriefing session. Here is the agenda from that meeting.
The level of participation varied among attendees at this session. Some came to learn more about what a Connected Educator is. Others were rock-stars rocking the PLN world with social media (such as @therealgnolf ) What participants had in common was the desire to learn how others were using social media to find educational resources and make connections with other educators.
Here were some of their a-ha moments from the session:
What I found interesting during this session was the emphasis on the visual tools that teachers were looking at (instead of the usual tools such as Twitter). While I would highly recommend Twitter for teachers getting started, it's important to note that there million tools that could be used to connect with other teachers that venture outside the format of a 140 character message.
Pinterest was discussed at length. While I used Pinterest to plan my wedding two years ago and currently use it to store great recipes or pictures of cute hair cuts for my stylist, I could definitely see why it was popular among the teachers at my school. Pinterest and flickr are great tools for creating digital portfolios.
One of the Connected Educator activities in the Starter Kit was to use Digital Storytelling to express a point of view. This also drew a bit of interest and is made easy with our access to Google Apps (and Youtube.com Editor tool).
Did you participate? What were your big a-ha moments? Please share on this #ce15 padlet wall.
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