Let's Do it!

I've been thinking a lot this week about sharing. In our School district, we are a little behind the eight-ball. Here is a message I wrote on our CBEILT Google+ community page tonight.

Ok #YYCBE educators - Let get the positive message out there! It's time we teachers took control of our hashtag and started sharing the amazing things we are doing in our classrooms and schools.

Here's 4 simple ways we can do it!

1. Document your story (anything from 140 characters or more through a blog post or image)
2. Share it on the CBEILT Google+ Community and on Twitter (if you're not on Twitter, then you need to be!) and add the #yycbe hashtag
3. Search the #YYCBE hashtag - Look for positive stories - modify and/or retweet those stories
4. Retweet great articles and stories you find elsewhere and add the #yycbe hashtag
5. Please note - if you modify a tweet or add something else, the orginal author will be notified and can then retweet too, which in-turn will continue to build more momentum!

This last week has been amazing! We are already starting to push those negative stories further and further down the newsfeed! Let's keep it up and build momentum!

Making Great Learning Go Viral

This week I attended a workshop (Create, Innovate, Voice) run by the one and only George Couros this week. While what we learned, wasn't really all that new to me, I took away a tonne. It also got me thinking a lot about how we can, as a school district, celebrate the amazing things that happen in our classrooms.

Our school board, the Calgary Board of Education (hashtag #yycbe on Twitter) is the second biggest school district in Canada. It turns out we have one of the smallest presence on social media platforms out of many school boards in Alberta, let alone across Canada.

Our organization/school district hashtag is overrun and dominated by the media and the general public. It is predominantly associated with negative comments and news articles about things that are happening in our district. We, as a large group of passionate and caring educators, can change this negative view of  #yycbe. We have amazing things happening in the CBE and we also have a 10 000 strong staff that can help with spreading the word!

What I think we need to do is take away some of the fear away from sharing outside the walls of our own school, maybe even outside the four walls of our classrooms. If we embrace that change that is happening, instead of hiding from it, we can make a difference.

It is so easy to, and feels so much safer to isolate ourselves within our own context. If we really want to grow as educators, I believe we need to be reaching out and connecting with others more often. This reaching out helps us think outside the box. It gives us different views and other ways of doing things. It also can confirm the great things that we do in our own practices. We also need to remember that every one of us has something different to offer and can offer something to each other too.

In our workshop, it was awesome to see other people get excited about Twitter as a networking tool. There were not many people that had previously joined twitter but after the session, we had a whole lot more people willing to experiment and learn more about this amazing networking and PD tool.

It's exciting to thinking about the challenge of increasing our Social Media presence. We have a big job ahead of us but because our sheer size, we also have the possibility of going big, very fast. All we need to to start gaining some momentum.

Let's do this #yycbe!

Here is the story that was told through Twitter throughout the day with George Couros (@gcouros). It was fun seeing new people tweet and connect through this medium. Let's hope it continues!

  

Why Become A Twitter Teacher Twit?

I have been a Twitter 'Twit', as my Principal calls it, for a little over 2 years. I started off knowing very little about what it was and who would possible want to use it. I explored a little and mostly perused tweets by searching for particular current events. Being a die-hard Ex-Pat Kiwi, my first tweet was about the Christchurch Earthquake that happened in New Zealand in February of 2011.

Suburb carnage http://bit.ly/dHcgDv #eqnz
— Steve Clark  ADE (@stevewclark) February 24, 2011

The first thing I really learned about twitter was how incredibly fast news is broadcasted through this medium. I think I even found out about the earthquake before my parents did (who live in NZ). I remember thinking how powerful this tool could be for communicating with others. At that point, I didn't even think I would ever use Twitter as a PD tool.

Tonight I was trying to find something I was sure I tweeted sometime in the past year. I downloaded my Twitter archive and I found a visual representation of my tweets over the last 2 years. I posted my exciting analysis of it in a screen recording below.

Last year I found a blogpost by Daniel Edwards (@Syded06) posted that described the 10 stages of Twitter for Teachers - It can be found here - http://dedwards.me/2012/06/13/teachers-the-10-stages-of-twitter/. I resonated with this post so much. It matched my learning curve with Twitter to a tee! I wonder how many others have had a similar experience?

I cannot even begin to explain how much I have grown as a teacher since being connected with twitter. In a year of being an active user, I have experienced ALL of the following, I have:

• Connected and networked with thousands of passionate teachers worldwide
• Developed a PLN (Personal Learning Network) of 700 hundred strong
• Become an ADE Class of 2013 (Apple Distinguished Educator) - I didn't ecen know what an ADE was until I followed a colleague Duncan White (@duncwhite) and saw the apple symbol in his profile
• Shared 100's of things I've been a part of in my school and district
• Taken and used great ideas from teachers around the globe
• Promoted PD events within our system
• Connected with teachers in our system to discuss the learning commons concept
• Found an abundance of technology based resources from other people sharing
• Discussed issues and events with teachers, globally
• and maybe the biggest thing for me, Made my learning VISIBLE!

To any other teachers out there who happen to be reading this. I challenge you to begin the journey. Open the door of your classroom and let the world take a peek in. We all have something to share that others would find value.

Tonight I found this challenge from fellow Tweep and ADE Carl Hooker (@mrhooker). http://hookedoninnovation.com/2013/03/20/the-21-day-twitterguide4beginners-challenge/

Keen to try it?

Networking Works! But how do we get more interactions?

In the past year, I have been trying to network as much as possible. I have tried to do this for a couple of reasons...

1) To share some of the awesome work I am a part of in our building. The power of sharing has really shown itself to be powerful for me. It confirms that we are a doing some great in our building and also is great to get some feedback from other educators. I also believe we do not have enough sharing of great resources and ideas that work within our system.

2) To get to know as many of the great people around me in our huge organization. After applying for jobs last year, I realized I knew no-one. To get my name out there and be known, I have come to realize I need to know people. For career development I think this is crucial. I don't want to rely on getting lucky (or unlucky for that matter) in my next job, I want to be in control of where I work next.

Twitter Handle - @stevewclark

Utilizing Twitter as a networking tool has showed me the benefits of networking. What is weird to me, is that it's been easier to network with people around the world than the people that are geographically close to me and work for the same public school board.

Area III Learning Commons Collaborative Blog

My blogs have been great to do the first of the above examples of networking. However, a lot of the time I don't get any feedback from people that read or browse my blog posts. It would be great to see the comments come in and get more interaction. To do this, I think I need to increase the amount of people that actually visit the blog to start with. Maybe over time the interactivity will increase. Maybe teachers in general don't like to comment and leave feedback. I wish this would happen more so the conversation can continue past the point of one person sharing.

Marlborough Mobile Learning (iPad Blog)

I have never enjoyed my work as much as I do now. Getting to know a ton of new people and having great conversations about learning has played a big part in my enjoyment of teaching. I look forward to the future conventions and interactions we have.