Teaching with Technology

This morning I took part in a focus group looking at developing leaders throughout the education system. The group had an excellent range of leaders present from executive heads of large colleges to lowly teaching deputies like myself!

The interesting thing that came out from the whole of the morning was the overwhelming feeling that the training at the moment on offer provides excellent opportunities in terms of leadership theory and understanding, but perhaps does not as yet provide practical operational experience / mentoring.

Most people seemed to agree that the best development they recieved was the face to face non judgemental discussions that were as a result of attending such events / training. It also highlighted the importance of having a mentor to challenge and guide you through early leadership.

This confirmed for me the value of blogging and using Twitter (see previous post) as professional development tools. Although these tools do not provide mentoring as such they do allow you to reflect and evaluate your thoughts (blogging) and to ask questions to your peers (Twitter.)

The difficulty at present as I see it is that there is no structure to the network that you can put together on Twitter so work needs to be done to put professionals together or hash tag appropriately.

As such I’m going to see if my network can help me build such a discussion forum. #leadershipexchange

Over the past few months I’ve become more and more convinced by the power of Twitter as a tool for my own professional development.

Twitter is a rather abstract concept to get your head round. Concieved as a way of social networking (think facebook status updates) it has taken on a whole new identity when pit into the hands of education professionals. I and others in my PLN (personal learning network) use it to post ideas about classroom practice, share useful websites, point followers to useful blogposts and perhaps most importantly ask each other questions.

In all honesty it has been one of the most useful and Inspiring things that I have ever done professionally. I see its strengths as follows:
- Brevity, there’s not much chance for waffle in 140 characters!
- Engaging with other educators globally.
- Non-judgemental discussion and opinion.
- Ideas, ideas, ideas!

If you are thinking of getting into Twitter, and I would recomend that you do, then the key is to follow people who have similar interests to you professionally. Linger around ‘listening’ to conversations, check out recent ‘tweets’ and use Twitter tools to see who’s following who to build up your PLN.

Most importantly engage and share tour ideas / views!

If you want to see what it’s all about follow me: @mrkp

Get involved in the conversation.

After much faffing around I’ve moved my school blog to www.charlestownprimary.wordpress.com for those people who are interested!   Please go along and have a look and see what we’ve been upto in our school.

I’ll sort out another roundup post at some point over the holiday, but things have been completely insane for the past few weeks in terms of workload.  I can tell that people have been waiting on the edges of their seats!