Developing Community
Building community as a Professional Learning Leader is crucial for buy-in and engagement. In my profession I am asked to host many back to school workshops and follow up professional developments. I speak on classroom technology, iPads, Chromebooks, 21st century skills, STEM integration and more. In addition to these workshops, I teach graduate level courses to teachers on teaching and learning with technology. Here is a sample of a two-day workshop that lets teachers know "What to Expect" from the 21st Century Teaching & Learning Workshops.
For workshops like these I set up an online community like Google+ (or have then join an existing Community) to help with the engagement when we are not meeting. Some of the two day workshops are weeks apart, and the online communities are ways we can continue to be engaged even when not meeting regularly.
For these online communities I will post norms for online etiquette or "Netiquette." Here is a copy of my Netiquette Policy which was adapted from Virginia Shea's The Core Rules of Netiquette and Greta Steber. (1994 - 2012). Core Rules of Netiquette. Learning@CSU. Colorado State University. Available at http://learning.colostate.edu/guides/guide.cfm?gu
Reflection:
I have found that I like to build communities for my students. I am in the process of trying to set up a community of teachers that want to talk about STEM and the technology to help implement STEM in the classroom. I'm thinking about doing this in a Google+ environment. I think this type of community can give a voice to the voiceless and also allow those who like to engage a place to post and share resources and successes. I have tested this platform out with some of my courses, and I found that when I leave the course community open I still have students share and post for their classmates even after the course is over. The students often ask me not to delete the G+ Community because there are so many resources on it that they often want to refer back to an article or link that was posted there.
As a Professional Learning Leader, being able to initiate the first welcome is important. Starting with a welcome video that explains how to make their own welcome video has been successful. This semester I have a course that did not meet for the first two weeks. We got to know each other via the Google+ Community introductions. I really felt like when we finally met face to face that I knew them, and I think they felt like they knew me. This type of honesty and leading by example is what adult learners want.
Online or blended or virtual environment sometimes provide better support to participants than a face-to-face environment. I see in my face to face professional developments and classes that there are dominators, those that interrupt and dominate the conversation. This often means that the quiet or non confrontational students are left with no voice. In an online or virtual environment all students have a voice and I often ask for not just a typed response but a video response at times. This video gives the students an opportunity to have a literal voice in the discussion. It is important to create the community of involved participants as well as a safe place for voices, ideas and opinions to be heard and validated.
It is my opinion that online communities are successful if the shared virtual space is welcoming and safe as well as engaging and relevant. If we create online communities, then we must make them safe places to speak and reflect. We as Professional Learning Leaders must keep the content on point and meaningful. If we are not engaged then how do we expect others to stay engaged or invested?