Journal 2 - Join the Flock

How does the old saying go?  A Tweet in the hand is worth two in the stream?  I recently read the article "Join the Flock" by Hadley Ferguson where she discusses the immense value of establishing a PLN, or Personal Learning Network.  Twitter, a social network and microblog, contains endless streams of information posted by people worldwide.  But how do we become integrated into this community and streamline this continuous flow of information?  Ferguson offers simple steps to gradually become one of the "Tweeple" that share ideas, links and knowledge.  After creating a Twitter account, find people or groups to follow and start listening.  Feel free to follow links and read articles, but the goal is to begin sharing this knowledge with others by Retweeting and tagging posts with Hashtags (#).  Gradually, you will develop a voice in the community by adding comments, sharing your own research and contributing to this stream of learning.

How will Twitter and a PLN help me develop skills as a teacher?
Teaching is just a type of collaboration.  Teachers research and devise methods to share the information they learn with others.  As teachers, however, we must constantly seek out and learn methods to improve our skills.  Twitter allows us to collaborate with others almost like the world's largest Think tank.  No longer are we subjected to hours of researching and navigating information from scratch.  The Twitter community gives us instant access to relevant information, which comes to us rather than seeking it on our own.  Less time is spent fishing for ideas, while more time can be spent integrating ideas and methods into our classroom.

Why Twitter?
Twitter is unique in that it limits the writer to 140 characters.  This makes tweets, or posts, extremely efficient.  Links, questions, comments, etc. get directly to the point.  Having this limitation allows quick searches and easy navigating.


Ferguson, H. (2011, June/July). Join the flock. Learning and Leading with Technology, 37(8), Retrieved from http://www.learningandleading-digital.com/learning_leading/20100607?pg=14&pm=2&fs=1#pg14

Technology Self-Assessment: School 2.0 (NETS-T 1)

NETS-T (1, 2, 5)


Using the Reflection Tool on the School 2.0 website, I took a questionnaire based on the NETS-T modules regarding my success of implementing technology into my classroom.  For activities that I did not indicate as successful, the results offered various resources to help improve those categories.

What's so wrong with being wrong?  Students are constantly assessed by any number of tests starting from the moment they step into the classroom.  Right answers get rewards.  Wrong answers get reprimanded.  So where do students find the desire to think otherwise?  School, at some points, became very stale to me.  Everything had to be submitted in a particular format, or with a particular look.  Even if a project was "left free to the imagination", there was still a quiet pressure to conform to previous models.  As I grew older, and eventually returned to the classroom as a substitute teacher, I began to notice that the system never changed.  Creativity was still sterilized.  From that point, I vowed to bring creativity back to the classroom.  Students get enough rights and wrongs already;  I don't need to add to that.
I was curious to see how I could develop my own understanding of Creativity, and the need of it in the classroom, so I explored the NETS-T Module: Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity.  Ken Robinson gives an engaging lecture on how "Schools kill creativity".  He proposes the idea that schools are still caught in an old system based around emulating the work world.  Education has implemented a heirarchy of subjects:  Mathematics and sciences sit at the top while the arts sink to the bottom.  Why is that?  Despite our understanding of the learner (that intelligence is diverse, dynamic and distinct), there is still a resounding message that the arts have little value in the world of academia.  Change, however, begins with questions.  It begins with admitting that something is wrong because, "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original" - Ken Robinson.