I have been teaching for eight years now. I am more connected then ever, using social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to learn and share ideas with fellow educators. This process has been a slow one for me but I am embracing the change, digging in and learning as much as I can from others. This has been beneficial for me and those I teach with.
My transformation to develop my Personal Learning Network began by reaching out to others in my immediate. During my plan time I often visit other teachers to watch lessons to see first hand the wonderful activities that are happening in my own building. Reaching out to others has lead to better ideas and a greater understanding of my strengths and weaknesses. YouTube has also been a wonderful resource for ideas.
More recently I have used Google Drive and Google Forms to keep myself and my team connected and organized. My first grade team has moved from making individual plans to collaborating online to develop meaningful lesson plans together! We also house all of our data online, making it easy to compare data among ourselves. This has been a process and has changed several times through the past year but we are working together to make our team more efficient. I would say that we are more connected than ever.
Thank you so much for sharing the YouTube Video: Every kid needs a champion! I will definitely be sharing it with my staff. All teachers to grow and learn. Observing another teacher deliver a lesson to their students is a "win win" for all. It makes for great collaboration and communication among staff members. I haven't used Google Drive or Google Forms at all, but I need to familiarize myself with them. I use Dropbox to share documents with my staff.
ReplyDeleteWhen you do try using google tools I think you will find them easy to use. I have found them to help keep my personal and work life more organized. I really love having all my documents accessible at anytime. If you ever need any help using them I would be more than happy to help. All we would need to do is use google hangouts and I could easily share my screen with you to walk you through anything you'd need help with. I learned by using YouTube and playing around with the products.
DeleteIt's great to hear you're using Google Drive with your team at school. I couldn't live without all the apps in Google Drive for my job.
ReplyDeleteThanks! I agree. So far my favorite has been using google forms to make a formative assessment for my team to use with our DESE project to measure the effectiveness of our teaching main idea and details. It was really nice to see all of our data in one place and it was great practice for our first graders to take an assessment online. We found that they did pretty well working the tests but needed to teach how to get to our class websites where the assessment was posted for them.
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