The Couros brothers are a family that is super passionate about technology in the classroom. Earlier in the term George talked to us about the strategies he is implementing in his school out west and more recently Alec gave us some insight on networking.
The message that Alec gave to us was how important it is to establish a network because of the amount of advantages it can have to you as a teacher. Getting online and putting yourself out there early on in your career creating a network for yourself opens you up to so many people and ideas that can help you along the way. There are so many ways that you can network with other people and other educators. Alec talked about the use of Twitter and Classroom 2.0, establishing a blog and creating an online presence.
Alec himself is evidence in how well networking can work. It was amazing to see the amount of people he has networked with and how much they are able to help each other. The fact that he was able to start a google doc and post it so people can see it was awesome because of the amount of feedback he was able to get. It was cool to see how so many people were viewing the document at once and how he was able to take feedback from some people he has never even met in person to create a better document.
He emphasized how helpful people can be online and the positive impact it has had on him. It is amazing how people will help people that they have never even met. I hope that in the future I am able to establish a network with people that will be able to share ideas with me so that we can help each other in our careers. Learning should not be sheltered sharing ideas is such a good way to not only learn yourself but pass on to your students. Becoming networked is going to be such an important part of education that it is important that we begin the process as soon as possible.
Jay,
ReplyDeleteBoth these guys had great talks for us, and it was cool when Alec showed us the power of Networking with people, when he used flickr as an example...what was it again....Someone tweeted that they wanted pictures emailed to a flickr account for a specific theme for their classroom, and within hours, the guy had hundreds of pictures for his class presentation.
It's cool what we can do if we get ourselves out there and begin to build networks with other educators.
It never hurts to meet new people, you never know what information they may have for you down the road.