My greatest take-away from this week is this: There are some really smart, talented, inquisitive educators in Alaska's schools...and a number of them happen to be taking EDET 636 this semester. I am blown away by the variety of focus areas represented in the research proposals for this course: so much variety, so much enthusiasm for learning more about the impact of technology on student learning, so much purpose in the posing of the questions out there on my colleagues' blogs.
I hope that some of my comments on colleagues' proposal helped them consider questions as much as their questions helped me. Scott and Sunshine both asked really good questions, and my friend Patty, who is pursuing a completely different course of study at a different UA campus, challenged me to think through some things that I hadn't before. Questions from peers are so important, as they force us to recognize those blind spots and fill in the blanks we hadn't previously noticed.
Thursday night Twitter chats continue to stretch my ability to follow a conversation that occurs in spurts and sputters of 140 characters (or less). While I admit that I really long for a good "old-fashioned" Google Hangout so I can actually hear people talking, see the faces of my fellow classmates, and participate in a chat that I can actually follow, learning how to participate in a Twitter chat is an important exercise for someone who likes to see herself as being "techie." The sheer number of regularly-held Twitter chats out there is mind boggling. I'm a fairly recent Twitter-fanatic, and I realize that developing "Twitter-chatting" skills is actually beneficial to my professional development. After all, if 20 people across the world are looking at the Google Sheet listing the Weekly Twitter Chat Schedule on a Sunday evening, there may just be something to this method of professional communication and collaboration!
I hope that some of my comments on colleagues' proposal helped them consider questions as much as their questions helped me. Scott and Sunshine both asked really good questions, and my friend Patty, who is pursuing a completely different course of study at a different UA campus, challenged me to think through some things that I hadn't before. Questions from peers are so important, as they force us to recognize those blind spots and fill in the blanks we hadn't previously noticed.
Thursday night Twitter chats continue to stretch my ability to follow a conversation that occurs in spurts and sputters of 140 characters (or less). While I admit that I really long for a good "old-fashioned" Google Hangout so I can actually hear people talking, see the faces of my fellow classmates, and participate in a chat that I can actually follow, learning how to participate in a Twitter chat is an important exercise for someone who likes to see herself as being "techie." The sheer number of regularly-held Twitter chats out there is mind boggling. I'm a fairly recent Twitter-fanatic, and I realize that developing "Twitter-chatting" skills is actually beneficial to my professional development. After all, if 20 people across the world are looking at the Google Sheet listing the Weekly Twitter Chat Schedule on a Sunday evening, there may just be something to this method of professional communication and collaboration!