Apr 3rd, 2011
Community Building
By far the highlight of this class has been working with the teachers form my school. When I first knew I would be taking this class, I sent out a few emails to the entire school to invite people to join me in the class. I had a few takers. Michele is our librarian assistant and 6th grade technology teacher. She and I work together and talk through technology things all the time! Much of what I do in my own classroom gets bounced off of her because we love collaborating. She has dabbled in tech stuff but she feels like now she really gets it! Both of us totally LOVE Symbaloo and we can’t wait to use it with our students. We are going to show it to the entire middle school faculty and propose that all students and teachers use it for next year. It will be interesting to see how that goes over. It is funny to me that we don’t think twice about their being a standard paper planner that all students and teachers must use, but then we don’t want people to tell us a tech tool to use. Michele and I are going to try to present it well so we get the buy in. It really will be a great tool for our students and teachers to use.
One of the other participants really stood out. She had just learned how to attach a file to an email this year and has major computer anxiety. She isn’t opposed to using it, but has no confidence and requires a lot of support. For her PLE she wanted to learn more about teaching writing to her 5th graders. To keep things simple, I showed her the English Companion Ning so she could just hang out there and get used to connecting online. We also found a great webmix on Symbaloo for her next unit on Latin America. That was definitely a moment when she felt the power of the Internet for gathering resources. A huge moment for Patty was when she signed herself up for Twitter! I was so impressed considering how timid she was about using online resources, that she would sign herself up! We didn’t even help her! She had seen my Tweetdeck and I had shown how I use it and she liked it so much, she went home and created an account. That was quite a huge step. We are now working on building her community so she can use it to its full advantage.
The five of us in the group met most Friday afternoons after school at my house and either watched the Elluminate sessions or worked with some online tools and talked about how to implement a PLE in our own learning. Believe it or not, it was a great way to end our week. We had time to stay and chat and share ideas and stories. Really, building a community takes that. Event though helping my peers navigate the course took much more time and energy than if I had just done the course myself, it gave me great experience in helping others build a PLE and I enjoyed sharing the experience.
Working with my colleagues has been a definite benefit to taking this open course. In case you were wondering if opening it up was worth it, for us it definitely was!