Key Concept 13

13.1 Candidates will be able to actively engage in professional learning networks to collaborate and share ideas and resources with colleagues.

My favorite tool for engaging with my PLN, collaborating with them, and sharing ideas is Twitter. Currently, I have over 1,100 followers, the vast majority of these educators. Every week, I engage with hundreds of them in Twitter chats and private Direct Messages. One part of my EdTech Program that I am extremely proud of is being known as the Twitter Guru and having helped many of my cohort members become more comfortable with the tool. The picture below of my profile will direct you to it, as well.

Through the past two years, I have become more and more accustomed to being a part of weekly Twitter chats, synchronous sessions with other educators on Twitter where we use a hashtag to share ideas. You may view an sample of this in the below archive. This archive, created using Wakelet, is of a Twitter chat where I had the honor and the opportunity to guest moderate. The hashtag for the chat was #PD4uandme, and the group meets every Saturday morning at 8:30 a.m. ET. Through experiences like this, I have been able to form a close bond with other educators, and seeing them every Saturday has become like having coffee with friends. On the Saturday of this specific archive, June 30, I lead the chat on takeaways and ideas we had discovered at ISTE the week before in Chicago. Some participants had been to ISTE; others had not. Everyone had the opportunity to share, learn from others, and ask questions. It was a roaring success, and we were even able to create a shared Google Doc of all the best sessions, tips, and tricks that were learned at ISTE.

A second platform I use to connect to hundreds more educators is Voxer. My second artifact is a screenshot of my Voxer homepage, and you can see that I am active in #MDedchat, the Loyola Edcamp Planning team, specific classes, and individual conversations with educators. Voxer is a wonderful, asynchronous application that works like a walkie-talkie. You leave a voice or text message, and then other users can reply when they have the time. This works perfectly for busy educators, as they never have to miss a message and can respond when they have a break in their day. This is an excellent tool for coordinating large groups of educators who are spread out geographically or have conflicting schedules. Again, the picture below will take you to my profile, where you can see my connections and groups.

13.2 Candidates will be able to determine and implement the best approaches to improving their technology integration efforts through a continual process of self-evaluation and reflection.

Reflection and self-evaluation have become an integral part of my teaching practice since beginning this program. While every instructor supported my reflection, I have to give credit to Dr. Kelly Keane for really starting me on the path to intense self-evaluation and reflecting in ways beyond simply thinking about how the lesson went. She taught me to focus on specific goals, principles, and results that I wanted, and to find a way for those to intersect with my students' needs. Below, you will find one of my absolute favorite artifacts from this program. It is a Reflective Journal from ED602, one of my first classes and my first with Dr. Keane. Throughout the Google Slides, you will see me wrestling with the LCPs (Learner-Centered Principles) and how I might better infuse my classroom with them to achieve maximum success for my students. There are personal reflection, results of student interviews, and data from self-scored assessements, all of which helped me determine what I did well already, where I needed improvement, and how I might achieve this improvement.

Even thought this was completed almost two years ago, I still return to the journal often. I love the style I chose for it, as it welcomes me back every time I visit. As a reflective tool, it is still doing its job, as I can compare where I am now with where I was then, identify what has changed and how, and continue to grow in the future. Now, it helps me reflect on how I can stay ahead of the curve when it comes to my own professional development. This journal deals mainly with the LCPs, and the ways students desire respect and choice will not change, like some technologies, in the immediate future. Knowing this, I can apply my own professional development toward goals that meet my students' needs. By paying attention to them, listening to what works for them, I can take these ideas and take classes in technology tools that will guide these needs or even attend sessions at conferences that align with what my students are seeking. New technologies will come and go, but how I integrate them into my classroom and with my students remains constant, and by keeping that in mind through exercises such as reflecing on this journal, I can continue my personal growth, not only staying current with what is to come, but even advancing ahead of it.