Five Steps For Schools to Become More Connected
Lani Ritter Hall, co-author of The Connected Educator (Solution Tree, 2011), responded to my previous post about blending technology into professional learning communities:
I’ll be interested in others’ comments here on their favorite blend and hope that you might be a bit more explicit in the blend you see working best for you and your faculty–
Here is my response, much too large for the comments' section:
In my school, I have loosely observed five steps toward becoming more collectively connected. Within each step, I share the primary tool we have "blended" into our important work.
#1 - Create a Forum for Collaboration
Our tool of choice is Google. We use Sites to house all of our important work. Drive is our tool of choice for creating our online documents, such as collaborative units of study (docs) and digital data walls (spreadsheets). Google+ has been a cool tool to share resources with team members between times when we physically meet as learning communities.
#2 - Document our Learning
For this we have been using Evernote. Teachers and students are curating their work in digital portfolios. The audio function allows even the youngest writers to share their ideas using multiple formats. As a principal, I am also starting to use Evernote for instructional walkthroughs and for organizing information from a staff training to share with everyone later.
#3 - Connect Beyond the Schoolhouse
Twitter has been a tool more of my staff are using, in addition to Pinterest and Facebook. Several of the ideas and strategies I see in our classrooms come from other teachers and thinkers via these social media tools. This leads to...
#4 - Increase our Collective Intelligence
We have been able to bring in some very knowledgeable people into our school via Skype - yourself included! Students and/or staff have had the opportunity to speak with scientists, instructional experts, and other classrooms through Skype.
#5 - Become an Expert for Others
As we have gained deeper understandings of what it means to be connected, I have encouraged my staff to share their innovative practices with others. YouTube seems to be an excellent way to create tutorials and post our work on classrooms blogs and webpages.
Becoming more connected is a constant process of learning, sharing, dialoging, reflecting, and then relearning. That is why I like the blended approach. It reinforces the concept of getting connected one step at a time. As we add strategies to our instructional toolbox, we observe what practices become augmented, or possibly even be replaced. These efforts to change how we do business takes time, persistence, lots of encouragement, points for celebration, and time.
Did I mention time? :)