Tag Archives: social media

See No Evil?

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by daveynin

I had the question yesterday from an IT Director (one that I have been asked several times) about the “issues” that happen when you open up social media in schools. He told me about a principal that said that they continuously deal with issues because of Facebook, Twitter, etc. (remember…the sites are not the issue but the behaviour) and the principal said that it would be easier if they shut it down. He then asked me how I would deal with it.

The first thing that popped into my head was this video of kids that aren’t any good at playing hide and seek:

This video really made me think that many believe if we close our eyes, nothing bad is happening.

Wrong.

In fact, if we shut down social media in schools, we are less likely to teach our kids how to use that sites safely and effectively, and students are more likely to make mistakes. Isn’t education the main way we solve problems in our society or are we adopting “ignoring stuff” as the new solution?

Recently, I did an interview on this very topic and the host said that my logic on this topic was similar to getting kids to drink with parents at home.

Really?

When the adults in the room say things like this, it first of all terrifies me, and then makes me realize they have not seen the positive impact that social media can make on their lives and the lives of others. I was so glad to see that Global Television recently wrote an article and shared a video on the work we are doing in PSD70, and more specifically, the classroom of Kelli Holden and her grade 4 students, to inform the public that there are a lot of positives that can come from the effective use of social media.

With anything, there is good and bad. Ignoring teaching our kids about this medium is not going to help them in any way to see the positives and we can’t just say, “not our problem” anymore. If we only teach the curriculum to our kids, we have failed. It is imperative that we work with our students to be people that follow their passions, be positive citizens, and make a difference in their world now, not the world we lived in as kids.

Thanks to Emily Mertz for doing a wonderful story on our teachers and students at PSD70! Check out the video below if you are interested in seeing what our teachers are doing to make a difference.

4 Guiding Questions For Your IT Department

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cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Maurizio Zanetti

Recently, I tweeted an article entitle, “The Obsolete Tech Director“, which had some ideas on how to ensure that an IT department stays relevant in the way they serve schools. With that being said, there was a really strong message being sent regarding IT departments and how many are seeing their work by the author:

“The role of the typical school district technology director has become obsolete. Speak with your average teacher in many school districts in America, and you’ll find the technology department is better known for getting in the way than for serving the educational needs of both staff and students. Many technology departments, led by obsolete tech directors, are inadvertently inhibiting learning. The mantra of ‘lock it and block it’ no longer works in a 21^st century digital learning environment.”

The author of the article is a technology director so I feel more comfortable where the message is coming from, yet my concern would be simply shooting the link off in an email to an IT department without any type of discussion. Having worked with both teachers and an IT department, it is important that we have conversations to work together and understand how we can work together to serve our schools. Daniel Pink sums it up nicely in his new book:

“Perspective-taking is at the heart of our first essential quality in moving others today.”

So to create a culture where we are supportive and serving of one another, I really believe that it starts by asking questions as opposed to simply making statements. Here are some ideas of questions that can start the conversation:

1. What is best for kids? – This is a question that should not just be asked of our IT departments but should be the question that guides all of our work. For example, the mindset about blocking many social media sites is that we keep the kids safe from doing this work, but in the long term, what seems to be best for kids is to educate them to navigate a really confusing and fast-paced world, as opposed to leaving them to do this at home. If you decide to open these sites, we have to ask what work is happening in the classrooms to ensure that students have an understanding of digital citizenship and their footprint. It is easy to say, “open the site”, but it is more important that if sites are open, that we work with kids to ensure that they are safe online. This question helps us to understand what we can do to help each other.

2. How does this improve learning? In the past, I have seen software programs that have been pushed out that have a business focus and then pushed as a great thing for schools. Companies can get very pushy with software and it makes good business sense to take a software and show how it can have multiple purposes. At any point though, if either educators or the IT department cannot articulate how any new program or software will improve student learning, why is it being pushed to all computers? IT departments should be able to ask this of educators as well. If a teacher just went to a conference and saw some cool software that they now think should be pushed to all computers, they should be able to articulate why it is essential for learing to their IT department. I believe that there is an opportunity to test some programs out in small cases, but when you think it is something that all students should have, we will need to articulate how it serves learning. If neither side can answer this question, we are wasting time and resources.

(See “Our Digital Portfolio Project” to see how it was articulated that we would be using WordPress for student portfolios and how it would give opportunities for learning. This was needed before we even went ahead with the project.)

3. If we were to do _________, what is the balance of risk vs. reward? Many IT departments look at risk assessment and they want the risk to be either low or preferably zero. But with that being said, how often do we look at the possible reward that is associated with doing something? For example, many schools block Twitter for all in a school as there seemingly is a risk of opening social media sites, but when you open up sites and you say to your community,
“we trust you”, there is a HUGE reward that can come out of this. If you also looked at the learning opportunities for opening up sites like YouTube, we have to look at not only the learning opportunities that are available with the second most used search engine, but also what we may lose. In my opinion there is a much higher reward with opening the site if you are to work with your students, but we should have to articulate what that reward could be instead of just saying, “Why isn’t YouTube open?”

4. Is this serving the few or the majority? This question is something that is essential when we make any policies on anything, but for some reason, we seem to go overboard when it comes to technology. If a kid stabs someone with a pencil, they might be writing with it by the end of the school day, yet if we have a cyberbullying issue with one student, some schools block social media altogether. It seems like quite the overreaction.

So anytime a new policy or procedure happens for an entire school, we have to ensure that we are not punishing everyone for the mistakes of a few. Innovative environments should be built on trust, not the lack of it.

(This is a great video talking about this exact idea and it is a great view for all staff.)

Empathy is something that is essential to the work that we do, and I realized when I went to central office is that there is a ton of work that our IT Departments do that I do not have the ability or skill set to do. They do amazing work. What I would suggest though is that you invite your IT team to observe in your classroom (not necessarily help) what you do on an everyday basis. If your Internet is slow, computers do not work, and students are having trouble logging into things, they want to know that but it is important that they see this, not just hear about it after the fact. On the other hand, invite IT teams to conferences on education (not only educational technology) and have conversations on how to get to the next level for student learning.

The success of the school is more likely to happen if your IT team and educators are working together, not apart. What are you doing to facilitate this?

Disconnect?

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In August 2012, I took the above picture at a Justin Bieber concert (don’t judge, it was for research) in Sydney, Australia. I am now sitting at a session in Toronto, Canada, with Bruce Dixon (from Melbourne, Australia) whom I have never met until only recently. What kind of blew my mind was that he used this picture (legally as it is Creative Commons licensed) in a presentation not knowing that I was the one who had taken the picture in the first place; I had to tell him this after. The world is so much smaller now and I think we are better off for that fact.

He did have some questions about the picture above:

Who taught these kids to take a picture with this device?

Who taught these kids to create a video with this device?

Who taught these kids to create any type of media with this phone and then share it through a social network with anyone they want to in the world?

If these kids can do all of these things with this phone and have the ability to learn all of these things on their own, why are they often banned from schools?

Here is my question…What could we be doing with that knowledge to further the opportunities for learning in our schools? Sharing a video from a Bieber concert is not transformative learning but is there not something there that we can build upon?

Then I connect this learning and this picture to this Danah Boyd quote:

Inside big companies, we take organizational boundaries for granted. Traditional organizational logic suggests that most employees of big corporations should primarily only talk to other people at their organization to do their work and should only engage with “competitors” when a deal is being brokered or there is a particular need for cross-sector collaboration. In this frame, companies are quite protective of their intellectual property and company secrets and see any knowledge sharing between “competitors” as a weakening of their core assets.

To a teenager growing up in a networked world, this model makes absolutely zero sense. Even if they’ve been trained in a traditional educational environment where collaboration is pooh-poohed, if they have access to the internet, they’ve developed a sensibility for obtaining knowledge from a wide variety of sources. More importantly, many youth in creative class environments are growing up with the idea that knowledge is something that you tap into, not something you innately have. Knowing where to turn to get relevant information is often as valued as knowing the answer.

And then this quote from the same article:

Building lifelong learners means instilling curiosity, but it also means helping people recognize how important it is that they continuously surround themselves by people that they can learn from. And what this means is that people need to learn how to connect to new people on a regular basis.

What do you think? Is there not a not a disconnect between this picture, the way that our kids are growing up, and the world that we are used to (not necessarily live in) now?

Is your school’s “digital citizenship” practice a pass or fail?

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cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Walmart Corporate

This past week, I worked with a small group of educators on becoming a “Networked Educator“, and we had some great conversations about how social media is changing a lot of what we do in schools. Within the group, there were about four teachers from one high school, who came to learn together and asked questions about how they could move their school to the “next level” in how they are sharing and learning with not only each other, but students as well. They told me that felt that they were in some ways behind as a school, but they were making progress.

One of the ways that they felt they were making progress was by having a school Twitter account to share what is happening at with their community. This is new to them and they are learning along the way, but the teachers admittedly felt that the school needed to do more to help their students. As I checked out their Twitter account, I saw the “Follower Suggestions” and noticed two accounts that looked to be student Twitter accounts. I asked the teachers if they were their students, they said yes, and asked permission to look at their tweets (which are totally public to the world) in front of the group, and they said yes, knowing that they probably weren’t going to like what they were about to see.

They didn’t like it at all. They were actually mortified.

We looked at both students and many of the tweets were sexist, derogatory, and just outright offensive. It made the group cringe and the teachers were embarrassed because we found it by simply looking up the school Twitter account. There was no searching for students; it was just automatically linked because they followed the account.

When I asked the teachers if they knew the student personally, they said yes, and said that both of them were great kids. I actually had no doubt about that. When I was a kid and was with my closest friends, I might have said similar things. To many kids now, they think that being on Twitter is, in some ways, being with their closest friends. I remember one student in our school was blown away that I even knew what Twitter was and that we saw their account (they used a hashtag that all educators were following).

Do I ever swear? Yup.

Do I ever swear on Twitter? Nope.

We have to talk with our kids and be honest with them that we are not perfect as individuals either, but we have to understand what is meant to be public and what is private.

Do we work with kids and really talk about the implications of what this can lead to? I don’t want to think that either student’s life will be ruined by their tweets, but I know that if they continue to go on this way, I would hate to think that they end up like Alexandra Wallace, who did a very dumb thing on YouTube which then quickly went viral. The question that I have with her scenario is, “did a teacher ever work with this student to talk about the possible consequences of her actions?” I kind of doubt it.

So as we talked about next steps for their school, they had a concern that the view would be, “Let’s just shut down our school account so this won’t happen again.”

#Fail

I was quickly reminded of this Dan Hasler post on social media and driving and his three main thoughts on how we do social media wrong in schools:

1. Driving lessons would be taught by adults (teachers or parents) with little or no experience of driving.

2. Driving lessons would only focus on what not to do.

3. Driving lessons would NEVER take place in an actual car.

So building on Dan’s thoughts and reflecting on this experience, I thought about a “rubric” of what schools could be doing in working with students to help them navigate these murky digital waters:

I do believe that we need to work with our students to get them to the point of “Digital Leadership” and the “Sincere Compliments” video should be a standard we guide our students toward. Nothing works 100% but we need to really be proactive as educators in our work with students, not simply worry about covering our butts. If we are really wanting to do what is best for kids, shouldn’t we be at the top (or at least working towards) the top?

Where is your school on this continuum? Would you swap 2 and 3?

Here is the link to the Google Doc that I created with this “Digital Leadership Continuum” that you are free to copy, paste and use as you wish.

The Bigger You Are, The More You Should Connect

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cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by jurvetson

“The challenge here is not to do social media better. The challenge is to do our organizations better.” Notter and Grant

I had a meeting with a very talented teacher named Jennifer Hollman the other day at a very small school named Keephills. The total population of students at the school is 47; the student population for the entire school division is almost 10,000.

I recognized her but had to ask myself if I had ever met her in person. We have talked a lot online and I have read and shared a lot of work, knew what she had taught (Science – she loves Bill Nye), and had connected with her a lot, but I could not for the life of me remember if I had met her face-to-face. Although I was quite embarrassed that I wasn’t sure about meeting her in person, what was pretty amazing was how much I knew about her teaching and what she had done with her students. This is something that wasn’t possible in my world a few years ago, and now I am learning a ton about teachers that I may have never met. Yes, they do need to be sharing their work through social media, but I am glad that I am able to connect and learn with them, and get to know more about many of our teachers who are willing to share their great work.

Would I prefer to get to know each teacher and student in our division in a deep way in a face-t0-face setting? Absolutely. Is it possible? Not really.

What I love about the work that is happening in Parkland School Division, is that I am getting to know so many teachers through the connection of social media. I watched today as two teachers who had never met in person, were elated to finally connect in a session that was delivered at our central office that they both happened to be attending. Social media isn’t the only way to build relationships, but it sure can help if used effectively.

Yet I see some organizations and leaders continuously tweet in one direction. Sharing articles from the “big thinkers” and “learning from Finland”, yet not connecting with their own staff. Are we missing a huge opportunity to connect? It sometimes seems that you tweet your stuff only, that you can quickly become “spam” to your own organization? Is it not imperative that we share and connect with the people that are at least using our school or division hashtag?

Larger school districts and their ability to “change” and be “innovative” have come into question lately. I get that the bigger you are, the tougher it is to connect with many educators, yet those relationships are just as important in a giant school/district as they would be in a smaller school? Doesn’t social media give us a new way to learn more about those people on the “front lines” than ever before? Yes, smaller schools and districts can maybe spend more time with the face-to-face conversations, but I would doubt that educators in larger districts would value the relationships with central office any less. Dean Shareski talks about larger districts and what could be taken as a “lack of trust” due to the size of the “machine:

“If you’re reading this and you’re from a large school or district and yet you’re happy with the freedom teachers have to make change and innovation, feel free to comment and help others see that it’s possible. For the most part, I’m stumped as to how the red tape can be removed. To me it comes down to trust, autonomy and leadership. There are some great leaders in larger jurisdictions that are humble enough to recognize they don’t have all the answers. That’s what often leads to trust and autonomy. However, leaders need other leaders and too often it just doesn’t trickle down.”

You cannot build trust with your community if you have never had any type of conversation with them.

Take a look at Elisa Carlson’s twitter feed. She is a central office administrator in the largest school district in British Columbia, yet often shares the work of her own teachers, and connects with them often. I have seen in person with Elisa, how her connection online has enhanced her relationships offline. She is taking advantage of this opportunity as she should. Chris Kennedy, Superintendent of West Vancouver schools constantly supports and shares the work of his school district. I remember a point in my career that I couldn’t haven’t even imagined a superintendent talking to me, let alone sharing my work openly with others.

The “big guy”, should always try act like the little one. Connect with people. Take advantage of the free tools that you can utilize to hear voice in real time, not when you plan a stakeholder session that once or twice a year. A simple acknowledgement here and there can go a LONG way in building a stronger and more trusting community.

As I think about how big schools and districts can be, we have to less “automation” and more “personalization”. Technology can either dehumanize or humanize; it depends how we use it. The “social” is really the most important part of “social media” and we need to take advantage to not only share what we are learning, but to build connections in new ways.

As I think about the constant development of technology in our society, I am reminded of this quote:

“We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.” Charlie Chaplin

If used correctly, that “machinery” can bring us more “humanity” than ever.

Digital Leadership Defined

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When I looked up the term “digital citizenship”, the first definition that I found was the following:

…teaching users the rules of good citizenship online; this usually includes email ettiquette, protecting private information, staying safe online, and how to deal with bullying, whether you’re a target or a bystander.

For the past couple of years, I have been really focusing on the notion of digital leadership, and although I have not seen a formal definition of what that would mean, I would like to think of it as this:

Using the vast reach of technology (especially the use of social media) to improve the lives, well-being, and circumstances of others.

I have written about students such as Martha Payne before, as well as teachers who work to empower the voice of their students. Yesterday though, I saw another great example of how a student is making a difference in the lives of his peers. In our schools, it is understandable that we work towards (as a minimum) students understanding the notion of digital citizenship, but how often do we stop there?

We really need to push our students to make a change in their world and highlight how social media can give them an opportunity that we never were given as students. Just being “citizens” online is the average; kids already exist online. We should be pushing for much more than this. Hopefully the video below can serve as an example and conversation starter for what a person can really do now to make a difference.

The Need for Innovative Leadership

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I asked the following question today on Twitter:

If the mandate is for innovation, how much should “best practice” drive that?

This question has been stuck in my head from while I have been reading the book, “Humanize“, which has really challenged and pushed my own thinking on “innovation” and how the culture of social media should be a culture that is embedded into our organizations. Here is one of the quotes from the book that started to create that connection:

“Almost overnight, it seems, the world has become social, and the work world, too. Markets are conversations. Social media has enabled us to connect with individual people inside organizations and brands. We’re leaping over corporate hurdles imposed by PR and marketing departments and the chain of command; customers are being heard in ways that ignore traditional channels. Content is being created that blurs the line between the “professionals” and the “amateurs.” Rules are defied. People are demanding truth, honesty, transparency, and openness from the brands and organizations they deal with every day. The companies that are winning are those that are listening—and social media makes it easy to listen (though maybe not so easy to manage the work of listening and responding), so the rest have no excuse anymore. And why is all this so disruptive? Because we like it. A lot.”

So if we “like it” so much, why are many organizations struggling to import so many of these ideas into their everyday operations? Many talk of the notion of transparency, yet is the process transparent or simply the products that we share? As Clay Shirky discusses, we live in a “publish, then filter” world, yet are we comfortable sharing our ideas as they progress? There is so much that are able to learn from tapping into the wisdom of the community but as Notter and Grant share, many of our old mindsets are obviously stopping us from moving forward:

Organizations and businesses have mechanisms in place to stop progress, to stop themselves from evolving. Mainly because of an inherent fear of change and fear of losing control, they have an interest in maintaining the status quo. We feel strongly that such an approach is becoming increasingly less viable. Mark our words: If you think your organization is behind now, just spend a year or two treading water, and you’ll see how much ground there is to make up. There’s no time to waste. It’s up to you, if you care about your organization, to help it not only survive this transition but to also flourish.

As a result of an open world, more people are starting to question the “principal” position not only how it is done, but even if the position is need at all. My guess and gut feeling comes that some very innovative and forward thinking teachers that are coming into contact with principals and organizations that are not ready to truly move forward, although the terms “21st Century Learning” and “risk taking” often come into the narrative that administrators are sharing about their school.

While I have worked with many organizations that are keen to push “innovation” (or that is the word that is being used), through my travels, I have noticed again and again, that it starts and stops with leadership. As I have heard this quote attributed to Todd Whitaker, “If the principal sneezes, the school gets a cold.”, it is shown continuously that the principal or leader of an organization always has a huge impact on the culture, whether it is positive or negative.

So what now? First of all, if we are truly open to a world of innovation we have to be able to take risks not only in our learning but in our practice. Focusing on “best practice” is a way to look backwards, but is it an effective way to move forward? We can always learn from what we have done in the past, as there are many things that we have learned from our journey that we know we must maintain (the focus on the “whole child”, building relationships with the community). We can also learn from other schools such as SCIL and watch how they are embedding teacher research and innovation into practice. Still we know that something with many schools and education is just not working. Watching a student speak last night on a Ted Talk, discussing how school is not working for her, she said something that really stuck out to me:

“There is a direct correlation between our old fashioned system, and our scarcity for a love of learning.”

#Yikes

So as we move forward we have to truly be open in our practice, share the process, and be comfortable with the mistakes that we will make along the journey. We have to not only give permission for things to not work perfectly, we have to push and encourage our teachers to go out of their comfort zones to improve student learning based on the needs of today’s learner.

Currently in Parkland School Division, we have started an project called the “Mobile Learning Initiative“, where we give educators the opportunity to have an iPad for each student in their class, in hopes of transforming the classroom and seeing what can be created that you could not before without the device. Is the iPad the best device in this instance? To be honest, I don’t know. Through the process, we are more focused on project based learning yet we are seeing what the device can do through the eyes of the educators that will use them. Within our schools, we will be sharing this “cart” amongst our schools to give different opportunities to different teachers, while they actively share their learning, both the negatives and positives, with the rest of the school division and the world.

As I worked on this initiative with Jesse McLean and our Learning Services team, we explicitly told the first group to not worry if things “didn’t work” they wanted it to, but to see what the kids would be able to do with the device in their hand. Similar to SCIL, we want that active research while pushing the boundaries of innovation. I was extremely excited to read the initial installment of their research, I was thrilled to see what educators Jenna Wilkins and Brad Arndt wrote about the beginning of this project:

Understanding that this pilot project is about exploring opportunities the iPads offer to help further our learning, both inside and beyond the walls of our school, we are going to have to take some risks. We are not going to have all of the answers or a foundation of knowledge and experience to guide us, which is somewhat daunting when we think about handing the students their iPads first thing Tuesday morning. What we do know is that we are open and committed to the learning that we, alongside our students, are going to experience during this process. And it is just that, a process.

First and foremost we hope to inspire our students to reach beyond the boundaries of our school to access, use, create and share their learning in ways that they may not otherwise be able to accomplish without the constant accessibility of an iPad. Second, we as learners hope to gain knowledge and skills that will help us incorporate mobile learning resources for the benefit of our students through consistent reflection and sharing of the successes, challenges and further learning opportunities of the project.

The notion of continuous learning, growth, and taking risks is not only going to be experienced by our students in this project, but our teachers as well. As we continue to strive and grow in all levels of our organization, we are seeing that enthusiasm to take risks in learning happening with educators, which in turn will trickle down to our students.

As I read their statement regarding their commitment to learning and this “process”, I could not help to think that even if things don’t work out and the project “fails”, is there truly a lack of success when students, teachers, and organizations take risks to further their own learning? To have this happen though, it has to be modeled continuously and consistently by leaders to create an “innovative culture”.

“It is high time we start applying the principles of innovation to the way we run our organizations. Innovation is not just about creating new products (or new social networks, for that matter). It is about change, creation, and new pathways, so it is just as applicable to management and the way we run our organizations as it is to products or social media. Management, after all, is really just a tool—a technology we use to help run our organizations.” Notter and Grant

Does Twitter Improve Education?

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cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by Ed Yourdon

There has been post after post acknowledging how educators love Twitter while also encouraging others to use it themselves. With that though comes skeptics (as there should be), questioning whether the use of Twitter is beneficial to educators. I have thought about that question a lot and I can give a definitive answer: yes and no ( I am 100% certain of this).

So to prove this, we have to look at a few things. First off, we have to look at how educators are using Twitter. Simply signing up for Twitter doesn’t improve anything in your classroom (similar to the notion that having a Twitter account will make people do inappropriate things and cyberbully). It all comes down to the use of it. I offer two scenarios in my own use of Twitter below.

Scenario A – Being on Twitter for the sake of being on Twitter

When I first started Twitter, my first follows were my brother, Shaquille O’Neal and every other Laker related Twitter account I could find. Although I liked talking to my brother, I was more worried about seeing what was happening with my favourite basketball team. Then about two weeks I quit using twitter and then thought to myself, “How does this improve teaching and learning? Whoever thought that is seriously crazy.”

Scenario B -Using Twitter to follow and learn from other educators

A year later, I went back to using Twitter in a totally different fashion and followed educators, found some great information on things that were happening in classrooms and schools, and it took my learning to a different level. I started trying different things and engaging in conversations that sometimes took place on Twitter or went to another space because of Twitter (blog, website, webinar, etc.). I started learning about things in an abundance, but also started to question educational trends (flipped classroom, BYOD, interactive whiteboards) because I felt that I had built enough knowledge to feel comfortable wondering aloud about these trends.

So here is the thing when people that actually use Twitter challenge with the question, “does Twitter improve education?” The first thing that I do when I see this question, is look at their Twitter stream, who they follow, and how they participate. I have seen an educator who follows no one other than 3-10 people openly pose this question, while another educator who asked this spends the majority of his time discussing travel and talking about things that really have little to do with what is happening in schools (on Twitter). I am not criticizing their use of Twitter or their knowledge of teaching and learning (I actually learn a lot from both of them while they may not learn much from me), but I am guessing that they probably don’t see the difference Twitter can make on the profession based on their own use of the service. When we actually experience Scenario B, it seems we are more likely to be an advocate for others to jump on the “Twitter Train”.

Yesterday, in my own school division, teachers in numbers not seen before, were sharing what they were learning and connecting with others on our professional development day. It was fantastic to watch and I was glad to see what was happening around the school division, while watching this group of educators engage in further conversations regarding their learning.

So to me, ultimately here is how you can find out if Twitter “works” for improving education. Ask someone who uses it about their engagement in their own learning and if that has changed because of Twitter. If you were to ask me, I would tell you that jumping on Twitter and using it how I do now, it has engaged me in my learning more than I have ever been in not only my career, but truly my life. I explore things that I am interested in, and I am exposed to ideas that I would not have heard of otherwise. If you ask someone else the same question and they say their use of Twitter has not engaged their learning, well then you have a different answer. Both yes and no, which honestly is fine to me.

If you are looking for a “number” as evidence, I don’t have one. All I have right now is stories and experience and to be honest, I am not sure that I need much more. Engaging in Twitter will work for one person, and will not work for another depending upon their use of it. But if I am engaged more in my learning than I ever have been, while also sharing what I am learning with others, doesn’t that say that “Twitter” works? It does to (and for) me. Do we really need more data? If more teachers focused on being true lifelong learners while sharing that learning openly, don’t you think education would improve? I know what I would put my money on.

UPDATE: As I don’t want to give the wrong impression, and based on the comments on the blog and Twitter, the title should have been adjusted to “Does the USE of Twitter Improve Education?”, as that is what I am really discussing in this post. As many have already shared this, I have chosen not to change the title so that people don’t feel what they have shared is being misrepresented. Thanks for the comments so that I could add this note and clarification.

Why I try to follow every teacher I can on Twitter

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cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by stevegarfield

Tony Baldasaro wrote a blog post yesterday that is getting a lot of attention regarding why he “unfollowed 5000 people on Twitter” and how he is going back to starting over. There is a lot of powerful thoughts in his post on how we actually connect with each other in this space:

As I pressed unfollow 5,000 times, I realized that I didn’t know most of the folks that I was unfollowing. Actually, it was more than that, I had no clue who these folks were. They were complete strangers. I literally had no connection to them, which, in hindsight, should not have been a surprise. As I said earlier, I didn’t “pay any attention to them” how the hell would I actually know them. It did hurt to unfollow folks who brought great value to my life, but I knew if I was going to do it, I had to fully commit.

Now I don’t want to say Tony is wrong, and from my several meetings with him I can tell you he is an awesome guy, but I do want to offer a different perspective.

Several years ago when I first started Twitter, I thought, like many do, that it was probably the dumbest thing ever. I used it randomly, followed some educators, but mostly celebrities, because I didn’t understand how it could improve me as an educator. My brother and others asked people to blindly follow me to help me build a network even though I had nothing to contribute in that space. It was not that I had nothing to contribute, but that I just didn’t really understand how I could do it on a social network. So people followed me and I offered nothing other than a wise-crack here and there. Then after a couple of weeks I decided to take a year sabbatical from the space

A year later, I was coaxed into trying it again and people blindly followed me knowing how I easily gave up on it in the first place. I actually decided to give it a legitimate try and quickly I was hooked. I was amazed at how much I learned from others and how open people were to connecting. I remember sending out a google form and having people share and reshare a tweet that showed my staff the power of Twitter for professional learning. I look back at that post and some people that helped have become good friends and some people I still don’t even know. Yet they were all willing to help some guy from Canada who was trying to help his staff.

I even watch today as my brother asks people from his network to help him get others connected:

Please help spread this info – doing a live session with students. Short survey. docs.google.com/spreadsheet/vi… @gcouros @shareski

—Alec Couros (@courosa) November 1, 2012

Him asking for this help while only following a select few would be hypocritical in my opinion. (He follows over 13,000 people.)

The network that I have connected with on Twitter have helped me through some tough times. When my first dog Kobe passed away people supported me from wherever they were in the world to make it through a difficult time. When I was dealing with some personal issues, again people rallied around me and either tweeted, commented on my post, or emailed me directly to offer stories and support. Some I knew and some were total strangers, but all were willing to help.

Currently, I follow over 8500 people on Twitter and that count will continue to grow. I rarely look at my “home” column because, as Tony mentioned, it moves way to fast. I use hashtags and lists to find information I am interested in. Every once in awhile though, I take a peek at that home column (interestingly enough, that is how I found Tony’s blog post) and find something amazing, or see someone I follow asking for help. Either I try to help them myself, or “Retweet” them to help them find a connection. If I didn’t follow them, I wouldn’t be able to do that. I do this because so many people have done this for me. Although it is my “Personal Learning Network” it is not just about what I take from it, but also what I can give, not only in information, but in facilitating connections and offering some help. I am, as all educators are, extremely busy, but when I can help, I try to do my best. We are all teachers and we all should focus on what is best for kids.

I look back at when I started and if people look at what I had actually contributed, no one would have followed me. I think they looked at what I could contribute in the future. I remember this summer when someone with 15 followers and 26 tweets, helped me out a great deal. If I used Tony’s way, this would have not happened.

Now some of you may be reading this that I am not following on Twitter and if that is true, I apologize. I don’t use a “follow back” function because I do limit my network to mostly teachers (yes, I do follow Justin Bieber), and do not really care to connect with companies. I also don’t check who unfollows me because I don’t really know how that would be helpful to me in any way. I do follow people that don’t follow me because I can still learn from them. The only reason I wouldn’t follow someone is because I find them offensive. I try to look at who follows me when I have an opportunity, and follow them back if they are an educator because I know that I can probably learn something from them. But unfortunately, sometimes I miss people and when it is brought to my attention I am often quite embarrassed. Allie Holland, Jimmy Casas, and Diana Williams are all people that I didn’t realize that I wasn’t following, yet I have learned a ton from them in a short time and actually would consider them friends now.

Although there are some tweeters that I look at daily, Tony could have done what he was talking about by simply creating a list of his favourite tweeters and inserting that column into Tweetdeck. It really is that easy.

I have learned over and over again, that I have no idea who I can help, who can help me, and who I can be the connector for between two separate parties, so I do my best to follow as many teachers as possible. You do not have to be a prolific “Tweeter” to help me become a better educator although your sharing does help. A ton of people trusted that they could learn from something from me a long time ago when I had contributed very little, so I am going to continue to do the same.