RSA4 Building a PLN with Social Media

Full Text: http://home.comcast.net/~jeffreyhunt/cu/edt6030/week_7/Lightle-Using%20Social%20Media.pdf             

               The article “Using Social Media to Build an Online Professional Learning Network of Middle Level Educators” (Lightle, 2010) discusses how the advancement of social media tools have made it possible to engage with professionals and build online educational networks around shared interests. The article points out that prior to this point in time, web pages didn’t allow conversations to evolve. (p. 49) Rather, they were only places one sided communication took place. Authors posted content and viewers could read the content. Now, educators can have rich, robust conversations about their interests online with other educators. Lightle argues “the conversations that used to happen in the hallways or teachers’ lounges or at conferences are now happening all the time on the Web”. (p. 49)

                The article “Innovative Professional Development: Expanding Your Professional Learning Network” (Perez, 2012) looks at why educators need a robust professional learning network (PLN). PLN’s involve sharing work related ideas with a network of colleagues via various forms of communications for the betterment of one’s professional practice. (p. 20) Perez argues that educators need a robust PLN for a variety of reasons including: access to the thinking of colleagues, access to timely information, the ability to post questions and get responses, collaboration with colleagues, and to communicate about events. Perez even offers a wide range of social media tools that can be used to grow one’s PLN.

                In this day of digital collaboration, it is important that educators not confine their professional development to only the thoughts of those inside their building. It is easier than ever to collaborate with educators who share similar interests, experiences, and insight all over the world. Social media tools give educators that ability without making it difficult to do so. Lightle highlights a couple reasons why educators may be tentative to jump on board and begin collaborating using social media which includes not wanting to sound unprofessional, fear of technical expertise, and a lack of time. It is important to diffuse these fears in educators as the benefits of an extensive PLN far outweigh any of the negatives. As Lightle points out “the more conversations you can have about your work, the more you can develop your specific professional interest”. (p. 49) Indeed, social media makes it possible to have many more conversations than one could have in the teachers’ lounge.

References

Lightle, K. (2010, November/December). Using Social Media to Build an Online Professional Learning Network of Middle Level Educators. Knowledge Quest, 39(2), pp. 48-53.

Perez, L. (2012, January/February). Innovative Professional Development: Expanding Your Professional Learning Network. Knowledge Quest, 40(3), pp. 20-22.

RSA3 Blended Learning Professional Development

Full Text: http://www.christenseninstitute.org/blended-learnings-impact-on-teacher-development/

In his 2011 blog post “Blended Learning’s impact on Teacher Development” (Hernandez, 2011) Alex Hernandez identifies six main areas that he believes teachers will need professional development to prepare for blended learning. The areas he believes that will be important when training teachers of the future include responding to real time data, targeting instruction, building culture and relationships, enhancing the curriculum, designing learning paths, and deconstructing the role of the teacher.  He identifies core competencies that teachers will need to be competent blended learning instructors.

His six areas are essentially what teachers will need to know to be able to transition from teaching whole class instruction, to be able to analyze individual data to most effectively teach each and every student of a classroom. He states that the old benchmark of getting student data every 6-9 weeks supplemented by individual teacher feedback will no longer suffice in the era of blended learning. Instead, he implies, the new norm will be click by click feedback to the instructor to provide real time feedback of student needs. It will be imperative for teachers to know how to interpret data and make decisions on how to best support each individual student.

A 2010 article, “Needs of elementary and middle school teachers developing online courses for a virtual school” (Oliver, Kellog, Townsend, & Brady, 2010)came to similar conclusions regarding what teachers need to be blended learning educators. The article cited two primary things that teachers needed to transition from regular educators to blended learning educators. They included strong guidance from leadership, and more importantly, a high level of teacher development. The type of professional development in the article shared many similarities with Hernandez’s article. Both articles are founded on the belief that teachers need to be able to design, and teach to students with real time data, and teach to the individual learning the content. Blended learning lends itself to being a very good way to accomplish many instructional goals and both articles identify ways to best develop teachers that can accomplish those goals.

References

Hernandez, A. (2011, July 11). Blog. Retrieved from Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation: http://www.christenseninstitute.org/blended-learnings-impact-on-teacher-development/

Oliver, K., Kellog, S., Townsend, L., & Brady, K. (2010). Needs of Elementary and Middle School Teachers Developing Online Courses for a Virtual School. Distance Education, 31(1), 55-75.