It is all over...Or is it just beginning??

Well I4ed is officially over and hopefully the wonderful and brilliant Mike Nantais will grant me a p+ for the course (that isn't sucking up, is it??).

Actually I really enjoyed the course and looking back over it and also the last 2 years of my education degree I really have learned a lot.  Even now as I am preparing for my last student teaching placement I find myself much more confident and using better teaching methodology within my unit plans then I did when I started.  Another thing that I find myself doing is waiting to plan my units.  Why you may ask? Well unlike in my first placement, I want to wait and get to know my students before I plan to much.  I want to see how the interact, what learning styles they have, and what each student brings to class before I plan too far ahead.  For this placement I find myself gathering strategies rather then specific resources for my units.  Yes I have basic unit plans and timelines but nothing concrete and even what I do have "planned" I plan to change as I get to know the students.

This is the most important thing that I have learned in my education...

The student lead the learning, the teacher simply guides them in the right direction.

Technology is great in aiding me with this.  I know that if a topic comes up that I don't know a lot about but the students want to learn about, I can easily have access to the information and possibly network with experts to guide them to through the learning.

I plan to use technology in my future a lot.  It causes tons of engagement by the students and allows me to connect with educators teaching the same things that I am.  This makes my life easier and the education for my students better so I feel it is a win, win, win!

Also I plan to keep blogging through my placement about what goes well and what doesn't.  I am also planning on posting my lessons, notes and resources that I use for this placement on here that I found to be successful.  I hope by doing this that whenever another teacher is teaching what I am they can come here and gather some ideas and resources.

Creating lessons can be very time consuming  Lets save our energy for what we all love to do, teach!! No one honestly loves spending hours planning but we all love watching our students learn.  This is why I believe in sharing what we do in class.  This will save everyone's time for what they really love to do!

Lets work smarter not harder!  Save our energy for what is really important...Our students!!

Summative Piece!

Here is my video for my summative piece for I4ed, I can't believe my career as a student is over and my one as a teacher is about to begin.

Anyway I hope you enjoy the video!

The future: The Entrepreneur

What does the future in education look like?  Well if you look at the Horizon wiki and read some articles from there you realize that everyone has a slightly different idea of where education is/should be going.  Two things everyone agrees on is that what is going on in schools today needs to change and that this change will come with the use of technology.  I believe these things too, but I will get back to them later.

What I really want to talk about in this post is about jobs.  I was listening to the radio the other day and I will admit it was an AM talk radio show (in my defence it is the only radio station I get when I travel to visit my fiance).  Anyway I was listening to the radio and this young 22 year old guy came on complaining that there is lots of jobs out there but not that many careers.  He worries that even when he does school he won't be able to get a reliable, well paying career job that he can raise a family on.  This got me thinking, is this true and if it is, how can we, as educators, prepare our students for a world like this.  The conclusion I came up with is that we need more entrepreneurs.

The best way to predict the future is to create it. 

– Peter Drucker

Being an entrepreneur takes many characteristics like: bravery, interest, passion, commitment, critical thinking, creativity, problem solving, money management, marketing, networking and hard work.  It also takes understanding hard times and that not everything is going to come easily.  It also needs a person who can deal with failure and grow from it.

The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake – you can’t learn anything from being perfect. 

– Adam Osborne

Do you think our system is preparing our students for these things???  I don't.  Entrepreneurs are the backbone to every society.  They are the ones that create new jobs, challenge establish business to do better and allow people who enter the company to move up the ranks and have good paying jobs/careers.  We need these people but our schools are not inspiring or preparing students for this.  The no fail policies and virtually no penalties for handing work in late is not the way to make independent, accountable and resilient entrepreneurs.

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. – Thomas Edison

So how does technology in education fit into this??  Well I believe that with the use of technology in our classrooms we can foster creativity, interest, and problem solving skills within our students.  Technology allows us to assign different kinds of assignments other then essays and powerpoint projects to show their knowledge.  They could make videos, write blogs, create websites, infographics, cartoons(even if they can't draw).  They can also get knowledge through novel ways like emailing experts, skyping in other classes or polling people(i,e, create a poll everywhere, print it on paper and set it up around the school, mall ect. and collect data on your poll everywhere site).  We no longer have to rely on secondary sources of information but can find primary ones if we only use our creativity, problem solving and (here is a new one) networking skills.

The other thing the internet allows is for the students to find their interests and passions within a subject.  I think everyone can become interested in any subject but maybe not every topic so with the use of the internet the students can research a topic they are interested in within a subject instead of learning with whatever topic you, as the teacher, choose to teach the content with.


So I hope it is clear, but I really think that if we use technology appropriately in the classroom we can inspire students.  We need to do more then just for streaming YouTube videos, but need to get students creating things, networking and gathering primary information in ways or on topics that they are interested in.  This way the next time I'm listening to boring old AM talk radio I won't hear about a poor 22 year old who can't find a career because he would have created one for himself!

The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary. 

– Vidal Sassoon

p.s.  If you ever want to find some good quotes on entrepenuership and motivation chack out these 2 websites!

http://www.minterest.com/99-inspirational-motivational-quotes-on-entrepreneurship/

http://www.glidedesign.com/50-great-entrepreneurial-quotes/

Great Presentations Today

WOW have we all come a long way.  Mike must be so proud of all of us!

For those reading that don't aren't from #I4ed, today in class we presented group projects on different internet/educational related topics.  The content in these presentations was great but I think more importantly was how they were presented.

We had one group do an amazing google doc powerpoint presentation that incorporated wordles (Mike's favourite, so I am sure you will get a p+) and pictures that made the presentation engaging.  On top of this they ran a todaysmeet during their presentation so the class could ask questions and comment.  Great idea to keep your presentation fresh.


Another group did a google doc as well but they brought in battles between members to keep the presentation exciting.  Also the graphics they used were awesome.

The next group blew everyone out of the water(except for the video presentation but we will get to that).  They created a wiki that they had to fight to get published publicly to the web (thanks for that added work).  They had tons of resources and easy to follow guides to how to use their wiki and information.  They even created a short video to introduce their pirating talk.  They put tons of work into their presentation and I will definitely be "creative commonly" using their site in my future!

My group did a glogster but we started by using poll everywhere to engage the class and get a starting point for our topic. We then used wall wisher to gather thoughts after the presentation.  I liked our ideas but everyone was way more creative!

The final group topped the charts with their satirical news report on cyber bullying.  It was funny, well edited and very creative.

I know Mike didn't want a retelling of what the presentations were about so I hope this counts because I wanted to draw attention to the types and quality of presentations that were created, and we are not experts.  Some of you did not even know google docs existed till 2 months ago.

I think it is so exciting what can be created with a little creativity, freedom and the fun of using technology.  I can only imagine what our students could create if given the same freedoms and knowledge that we are given in this class.  We HAVE to be those teachers that allow BYOD, promote the GOOD of the internet, not not not STEAL from the internet, not FILTER everything, and THINK about cyberbullying seriously.

  We are the future and judging by the presentation today it looks bright!

Great job everyone!

Infograms

Inforgrams are cool and a very interactive way to integrate statistics into the class.  Since they can be easily created by students they would work well as a way for students to show information about a topic.  I see tons of uses with this technology in a math class but also in science classes.

I plan to use them as a form of a summary of a class or topic.  The students will have to summarize the information gathered in the class.  They would also be required to add in something that was not taught in class (conduct some research)  This would make for a great project.  It would turn out to be like a tech version of a KWL!!!

There are also some great infograms that are already made that you could use as a visual way to show information that you are teaching in the class.

This infographic could be used during the ecosystem unit in grade 12 biology.

World's Top 10 Critically Endangered Species infographic by infographicdesignteam.

The students could research on why the animals are endangered and what is being done about the fact they they are endangered

Here is one that could be used when talking about pH.  This happens in grade 10 science and grade 11 and 12 chemistry.

Basic pH infographic

A great site to get some science based infograms is:

http://visual.ly/science-infographics

Here is one I created about how I love to travel, I hope you enjoy!!

How I Get Around | Infographics

Untamed Science

Untamed Science is a podcast that I found on i-tunes.  It is created by a group of scientists and educators along side movie making experts.  They cover mostly biology topics  but also chemistry and physics. The videos are very engaging.  They tend to be about 5 minutes in length so they fit well into any class. They have have a great website as well where you can access the podcasts, lesson plans and other interesting information about science.

http://www.untamedscience.com/podcast

You can access them by their youtube channel as well:

http://www.youtube.com/user/UntamedScience

It is a great podcast/youtube channel that I highly recommend any high school science teacher to keep up with!!

CHECK OUT ANIMOTO

I LOVE ANIMOTO!!

I have a few plans to use animoto in my upcoming placement and I hope you all will to!

Check out this video I created using Animoto about how to use Animoto!!

It is so easy and the videos look great, I think my students will love creating them.  By combining pictures and text the students can easily express their knowledge on any topic.  It is a great alternative to a power point presentation.  It also helps those students who do not like speaking in front of the class..

I really could talk about this web resource for hours but I think the best thing is to try it.

NOTE:  When you go to try it make sure you use the education site otherwise you will only be able to create a 30 second videos instead of the 3 minute videos you can create on the education site.

ENJOY!!

The Big Brother Internet

Today in Internet for educators we brought up big brother, but with an internet twist.  The question proposed to us was whether the internet enforces the "Dominant White Male" society that the western world lives in or if the internet gives voice to the under privileged and under represented in our society.

There was a lengthy debate.  Some felt that the internet definitely gives a voice to the minority.  They spoke about how you can research on things and hear their voice through movies, articles and posts that you may not have been able to experience if it was not for the internet.  The internet also gives a sense of anonymity as to prevent a reader from knowing whether the person who created the article, post or video is of the ethnic or social majority or minority.  This helps to eliminate biases based upon racism and sexism.

Their was another group who believed that the internet fits neither strongly on one side or the other.  They agreed with all the things that the group above made but they struggled to accept that regulators of internet content in our country do not play a role in oppressing the thoughts of the minority.  When you google something, google spits out an answer based on who pays more to be found by google or what has been viewed the most before.  This limits the ability of under privileged and new views from being found and viewed, favouring the "Dominant White Male"  Also the government limits and blocks certain things from our internet.  In the USA the government has the right to track your internet use and use it to incriminate you.  These types of things are definitely not privileging the minorities.

I tend to agree that the internet takes a very middle ground on this issue of privileging the majority or minority.  The internet is a representation of society at large but it is generally dominated by youth making it a glimpse at society in the future.  This makes me happy because the internet my not provide complete equality for all people but it definitely provides more equality then society at large does currently.

The future with the internet looks good as long as it remains as open as it is and hopefully becomes better at representing minorities as an equal in the online society.

"If it is free you are the Product"

This is a topic we briefly discussed in our internet for educators class with one of our guest speakers in late January but it is a topic that keeps coming up.

So what does it mean? You may notice that when you sign up to a lot of things online that they are free.  Things like Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, and twitter are all free but these companies are rich.  That just doesn't add up.  It also doesn't make sense for a company to create a product and let people use it as much as they want for free.  The thing is you are the product and Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and Hotmail are just things to lure you in.  The companies use the information that you in put on to these sites to generate money.  They often sell the information to advertising companies.  The advertisers will use demographic or keyword information from you to give you targeted advertisements that are likely to work on you.  Also Facebook and Instagram have been known to sell your pictures that you post to advertisers to use in their ads.  They can do this because they own the things that you put on THIER site.

I for one don't mind that this is the way things are because I am aware of it.  I know that I am being targeted by advertisers and that photos I put up on the internet are no longer mine.  Being aware of these things allows me to be conscious of what I post online and not to take advertisements to seriously. Using critical thinking is important,

I see the problems with these things from people who are uneducated about how free internet tools generate money.  I feel that high school students are at a particular disadvantage.  They are very vulnerable to advertisers and often don't think about the consequences of their actions (i.e. posting certain pictures).  They also don't think about the big picture and why things online are free.

To combat this we need to have real and honest conversations with our students about these things.  Parents often will have less knowledge then we will have about how the internet works so we can not leave it up to them to educate their children on this.

A great video to activate a conversation about this is this video.  Check it out

Video Learners

Is Video important in the classroom?

Obviously yes.  I generally teach high school science classes and finding hands on, real life experiential learning is important but sometimes impossible.  Take an anatomy unit as an example.  Watching gas exchange in the lungs is impossible to see within the classroom.  This is where video comes in.  Having a video showing this exchange helps students to visualize the process, making the process real.  It gives those visual learners in your class clarification and gives everyone else another way to view gas exchange.

Video is also great in explaining things in a different way.  Have you ever been listening to a teacher explain something and you just don't get it until your friend leans over, whispers an alternate explanation to you and everything finally makes sense? I believe the answer would be yes.  A video can be just like your friend.  It can explain things to your class in a alternate way then you, as the teacher, have, and this can help get more students to understand.

Their are a variety of places to find video like Ted Talks, YouTube and Discovery Ed.  Though these can take a little work deciphering what is good and what isn't, finding good channels, people or streams do help.
For our project we are suppose to find video's that we would find interesting to teach in class but instead I am going to list a few good channels and websites where I have found some meaningful videos in the past.

Discovery Ed one I like but it requires a subscription so if you are in a school bug them to get one to this great video site.

Chrash Course: a great YouTube channel that you could use as a test prep or a way to introduce a unit or topic.  The videos are 10 minutes and go through a topic quite fast, just touching on the important details   They are well done and have great visuals

http://www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse

Chumamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story, this is a great video that can be used to talk about racism in a classroom.  It could be used as part of the curriculum in a social studies class or just a time filler in any class.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg

Graphing stories-15 seconds at a time: This is a great website created by my favourite blogger, Dan Myers.  It shows different, real life events, and asks the students to graph the story.  It walks the student through the answer at the end too!  A math teachers must!

http://graphingstories.com/

National Geographic: This YouTube channel holds tons of great resources for videos.  They are well categorised and so are easy to find.  Great for activating a class!

http://www.youtube.com/user/NationalGeographic

This is just the tip of the iceberg   Just google top YouTube channels for teachers and I am sure you will find tons of other great ones as well.  

I also think it is important to let students create their own videos and post them to YouTube, Animoto, or whatever movie making site you choose to use in your class.  It is fun and makes students accountable for their work.  It also allows them the opportunity to share what they create with family and friends and if they post it on YouTube then in the future they could use it in job interviews or as part of having that positive digital footprint.

Connecting=Pride

Clarence Fisher thank you for skyping in with our class.  You talked about so much but what really drove home for me was how connecting your students with schools around the world you were able to make them realize how lucky they are to come from a small town.  Your students thought it must be awesome to live in LA until they learned they couldn't ride their bikes after dark or go swimming in the ocean whenever they wanted.  The students thought it would be great to live near shopping malls and celebrities until they realized they would have to give up the safety and freedom that they have in their home town.

I grew up in a small town about an hour north of Winnipeg and carry the small town pride with me every where I go.  When I was younger I wished I lived in Winnipeg because their was SO much to do their.  When I went to University in Winnipeg I realized I was wrong.  Sure I could go shopping whenever I wanted to and going to a movie didn't take up an entire evening but their was lots of things I missed.  I missed being able to run without almost being hit by a car or going quading through swamps.  There was also no privacy in the city and you could never see the stars.   Most importantly, small towns have a sense of community and support for one another.  For example, my best friend's mom has MS and needed to go for surgery.  The surgery was only available in the US and so it was going to cost a fortune to get the surgery done.  To help the family out the community put on a social, local businesses donated great prizes and they raised enough money and then some, to send my best friend's mom to get her surgery done.  It was amazing how much community support there is in a small town but you don't often find this in big cities.  For all these reasons I realized I want to raise my family and teach in a small town.

I have always thought it is important to help students have pride in their town and school but I struggled with how.  I know see that using skype and connecting my students with people around the world to do projects will enviable lead to this.  They students, while working in their projects with others students, will talk about their contrasting lives and in this the students will learn how lucky they are to live where they do.  Having pride in the school and their town will help the student to have pride in themselves as well and their is nothing more important then that.

How I became Twitterpated with Twitter

Like most people when I started twitter I wasn't sure what I was getting into.  I thought it was going to be like facebook but with only the status updates.  This was why I didn't want to get twitter. The only thing about Facebook that I liked was seeing the pictures and knowing what people were generally up to, not if they had a pb and j sandwich for lunch.
Once I got twitter I never used it.  I had no one to follow until I got into watching Sport Centre.  I started following Dan and Jay.  Their tweets were usually entertaining so it gave me something to read every once and a while.
Then when I took literacy for ICT last year, I started to following educators on and twitter became addicting.  I loved seeing the resources that other people are using in the classroom.  They also share their thoughts and ideas.  All this drives me to form opinions on things and search the web for resources.  I am not much of a tweeter myself, I tend to just take from twitter but I am trying to challenge myself to tweet things that I find online now to.  I use twitter even more since I got a tablet.  Using flipboard I can read article or view the websites that people tweet on one page without having to follow the link.  It makes twitter easy to use.  I now find myself spending the mornings scanning for new ed resources rather then watching Dan and Jay on Sport Centre. (Sorry Guys)

A Great Follow!

Dan Myers was a High School Math Teacher in the San Francisco area.  He is currently studying at Sanford University, getting his doctorate.  This is not why I like following him though.  I follow him because of his innovative way to look at math.  He believes that students need to formulate questions and find solutions to these questions that they developed.  Math texts book of today spoon feed students on how to answer question but do nothing to get the students to understand math.  I 100% agree with Dan.

Another thing I love about Dan is that he doesn't just talk about how math education needs to change, but he changes it and shares it ALL!!  When you follow his blog you get access to all his lessons that he makes.  He often takes problems you would find in a textbook, but then changes them to real life situations.  An great example is when he uses proportional reasoning by taking a picture that includes something of standard size in it(i.e. a credit card). Using the thing they know is of standard size they can determine the size of other things in the picture (i.e. a coffee cup) but he doesn't tell his students that.  He proposes a question like "how tall is the coffee cup in the picture?" and gets the students to come up with possible ways to find the solution.  After this he will bring in the actual coffee cup and see if the students are right.  He also uses this opportunity to discuss possible error in their problem solving.

I highly recommend any math educator to follow his blog.  He is very interesting.  If you are not sure if you want to follow him, watch the video below and I am sure you will be convinced.
Dan Meyers blog: http://blog.mrmeyer.com/
Twitter: @ddmeyer

Managing how you are Perceived

Man everyone was looking good last week at school!  Why? We had a career fair and some interviews with local divisions and superintendents.  They spent two days at our University checking out the new teachers.  We, the up in coming teachers, wanted to represent ourselves well to our prospective employers so instead of wearing the usually sweatshirts and loulou's we wore dress pants and a nice shirt.  We also polished up our resumes and readied ourselves to talk about our experiences.  This was all in an effort to get ourselves to be perceived in positive light.

The problem is that it is easy to give these impression on the day of an interview or career fair, but to always be giving these impressions is hard.  The internet demands us to be always on our best behaviour.  Every thing we do is recorded and even though most of that is not easily detected by people some things are.  Everyone (or most people) have a Facebook page with pictures and posts that are either uploaded by themselves or their friends.  These pictures and posts can easily be found by people, including our future employers and students.  This means that when we are out having fun on our own time and someone snaps a picture, we could be incriminated.  Everything we are doing may be legal but it is not necessarily respectable.  We need to be careful of this.

What can we do?

For one we can control the privacy settings on our Facebook pages but more importantly we need to focus on controlling what comes up when someone googles our name.  To do this we need to put things up on the internet under our name.  Having your own eportfolio/website really helps this.  Also when you do something, such as a prezi, glogster or other online project, save it under your name.  When someone googles you, these things will come up, not the negative things.  This will shows you in a positive light.  If you simply change your attitide to how you use the internet you can become your greatest friend when finding a job.

It is like being in an interview whenever you are googled! 

PLN: Mine vs. Theirs

It is interesting to look at the change in my use for the internet in the last few years.  When I was in my undergrad or even way back when I was in high school, the internet was used for socializing with friends.  When I was in high school I would IM people using messanger till the wee hours of the morning.  My parents would get angry because no one could call when I was on line.  Then came MySpace and from that Facebook emerged.  This was basically my extent of socializing on line before I entered Education.
I am not naive to think that high school students of today are only as connected on line as I was when I was in my undergrad but I still believe they use the internet primarily to connect with people they know personally outside of the internet.  The only interactions they may go out of their way to create is random comments on you tube videos or messing with information on a wikipedia entry.  To me a connected student would have a PLN like this:

  Mine, on the other hand, connects me with people I don't know.  I use the internet to gather and export information to/from fellow educators around the globe.  My PLN looks more like this:

Connecting with people is an awesome experience and has many positive implications.  For me it provides support when creating lesson plans.  It helps me gather perspectives on issues and helps keep me current on the changes happening in education.
The internet is a great place to gather information and connect with friends but the more you connect with people on line you realize it is so much more.  This is something our students haven't learned yet and something we can teach them so they can be ahead of their peers when they enter the work force and/or higher education.

The bad side of the internet

This week we had a wonderful presenter in my Internet for Educators class named Alec Couros.  He talked about the great things the internet can provide us with but he briefly mentioned how there is also a negative side to the internet, this is going to the topic for my blog today.

We have all heard about those internet sites that dedicate their web space to the demoralizing of people (thedirty.com), where they get their users to make insensitive remarks about someone they don't know.  They often function so that if you, as a user, want your post to be viewed along side the victims picture, it has to be crude enough to make it there. These sites sound scary and we have to hope that our students or ourselves never make it on them.  They have been known to cost people their friends, jobs and even their lives.  There are plenty of stories we hear about this stuff on the news and we constantly wonder how can this happen?

How can people post these things about people they don't even know and not be prosecuted for defamation of character? Well I don' know, but I think they should.

Another scary thought is that it doesn't take sites like thedirty.com to affect someone's life via jobs, friends and their mental state.  People can post negative things on walls on Facebook or send insensitive tweets.  Aside form this, something more of us are familiar with, is those not so tasteful pictures at a party or bar that get uploaded on facebook. These photos could cost us our career if the wrong person got a hold of them.  To top it off, students have gotten this idea that sexting is an okay practice. 

So what should we do about this?

Before you start thinking, I teach elementary and this doesn't apply to me, Alec informed us that he was talking to a group of 8 and 9 year olds and they knew about facebook, twitter, instagram, flickr and a few others.  He also said that even though people under the age of 13 are not suppose to own accounts on these sites, that the age they usually start joining these websites is at age 11.  Could you imagine being 11 and thinking about how what you tweet, post, or what photos you upload could affect you a decade from now? How are these young minds suppose to understand that the person they may be talking to is not there friend and that posting "going to Disney land with my family, leaving Sunday" is an invitation for thief?

So what do we do about it? Please comment and let me know your thoughts and I'll share mine.

Share or Beware!

              We complain that education is so hard in this era but could we imagine what it would have been like back in the one room school house times.  Young, mostly girls, would travel away from their families and friends to these small towns.  Once there they would have to prepare lessons for 20-30 students, all at different ages, intelligence  and most felt they had little need for education.  They had to do all of this with little to no training. They also had no one to share with or to ask for help when they were facing difficulties.  

              I personally could not imagine this.  I am nervous about having my own classroom next year, hopefully, but if I do I will be surrounded by support. I will have my fiance at home to help me on my struggling days.  My colleges in the school to lend me their expertise.  My family and friends are only a text, phone call or skype away.  Besides this I will have the internet to research lesson plans and resources.  My blog will give me an outlet to ask for help and share my success.  Also, I will have 2 years of specific teacher education and multiple PD sessions to help me succeed

                Compared to those one room school house teachers I am exponentially better off and for this I am very grateful.  Technology is a wonderful thing.  We, as educators, need to keep learning and striving to be better.  To do this we need to share and have an online presence.  This will provide us with the means to share our experience and find support, helping us keep our sanity on those challenging years.  I always like to think that no matter what situation you are facing, someone at sometime has probably faced the same or very similar situation.  This person can be a person of support and a great aid to you.  The internet allows you a place to connect with this person even if they are in a different country.

Making Connections

This week we had John Evans come into our classroom and discuss the topics around PLN (Professional Learning Network) and sharing on the internet. This reminded me of a post I did on my previous blog.  I think you will enjoy!
Think back to your first day of high school.  If your childhood was anything like mine you remember being nervous about whether your new clothes were the right fashion and if you would have someone to sit with at lunch.  For the most part you just wanted to fit in.  By the end of the first week you had made a few new friends and by the end of the year your new friends had become the people you did everything with.  You had made new connections and ones you thought would last a lifetime.

Looking at your friends now, some may be from that group you had in grade 9, but most of them are new.  They may be people you met in University, or at a summer job.  If you are older then me they are likely people that you work with or have kids that are a similar age to yours.  Either way they are the people that surround you and support you now.  These people are important for you to be successful and happy in life.

But what about your teaching life? Who supports you here? It is obvious that your co-workers do but I want to look bigger.  I can say in my student teaching experience, the internet supports me in finding great resources and lesson ideas.  This support is not very personal, and this is why I have been on a mission to make the internet a personal support. Joining twitter and adding local educators, I have been able to share with them resources, readings, and ideas.  If I am struggling with a unit plan or lesson idea I can just reach to my phone tweet it and within minutes have a bunch of people tweeting ideas back to me.  It is awesome, you never feel alone in planning and you never should.  Many teachers before me have had the same problems that I am going to face.  Anything from classroom management issues, to what poster should I hang on the wall can be solved by collaboration with others.  Twitter also allows me to connect with organizations like MTS (Manitoba Teacher Society) who keep me up to date on PD opportunities and news stories related to education.  

Starting a blog, though it seems very one sided, is a great way to connect with people.  Once you start blogging, you start checking out other people's blogs and learn that there are a lot of people out there talking about issues that are of importance to you.  You find ideas, strategies and perspective you never would have thought of on your own.  The blogging community is very supportive and always willing to give advice.

If you are not wanting to go so world wide, starting profession learning networks(PLN) are great ways of sharing information between teachers that are teaching the same things in your division or province.  They allow teachers to collaborate and with collaboration you are able to use the creative minds of more people to create a lesson that students will love.  The whole 2 heads are better then 1 saying!! If you are looking for a PLN right now I suggest looking into www.classroom20.com . It is a great place to learn and share.

So get out there, join twitter, start a blog and develop a PLN, you will not regret it and your students will thank you for it!!
John also talked about Maple, which is a PLN he has developed for educators in Manitoba. If you are an educator in Manitoba I highly recommend you get in contact with John and get you the site!

Welcome to the Blogging World...Round 2!!

I am just about to start blogging for the second time.  Last year I started a blog called "the garlic and the frog leg."  I was not very successful.  This year is going to be different!
Recently I started a course called Internet for Educators where we are required to blog at least once a week about our experiences in education.  Particularly I will discuss aspects related to technology in education.
I think this attempt at blogging will go much better!
Look forward to the journey!
Anna