Twitter’s power as a personal learning network made coming back to school after the winter break more tolerable for Lisa Noble and her Canadian elementary kids. The highlights included tweets from space, transmitted by astronaut and social media maven Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut who landed on the international space station just before Christmas. And then there was littleBits…
It’s Arwen Kuttner’s first year with iPads and her first year as a reading support teacher in second grade. Can the iPads help her struggling readers? When it comes to letters and sounds, she’s not willing to trade her multisensory learning techniques for a digital tablet. But creation-based apps could help deepen reading comprehension. “It’s up to me,” she writes, “to know when to use the iPads and when not to, in order to keep learning effective and meaningful.”
Like teachers, school leaders today must move beyond sit-and-get PD and take charge of their own professional growth. Elementary principal and Connected Principals contributor Lyn Hilt says Kristen Swanson’s new book, Professional Learning in the Digital Age, “provides practical, easy-to-follow steps towards becoming an effective user-generated learner.”
For generations, we have almost completely bypassed the development of true problem solving skills in our curricula, avoiding the hard questions “at the very end of the textbook chapter.” Instructional technology director Tim Holt makes the case that Problem-Based (not project-based) Learning can go a long way to address the deficit.
In this open letter, “Connected Educator” offers a blunt appraisal of the consequences for teachers and students when leadership refuses to connect classrooms to the world via public social media.
A “Connected Educators Month” in the United States — the rapid rise of Twitter PD — the coming of age of the Personal Learning Network. No question: It’s been an historic year for connected professionals, including PLP’s extended family of teacher and school leaders. Here’s just one example: the Top 13 Most-Read Posts by our Voices from the Learning Revolution group bloggers for the year just past. Each article listed here scored more than 4,000 pageviews during 2012. Now’s a great time to read (or re-read) them, as you resolve to connect and make a difference in 2013!
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