Collaboration

If there is one thing I have learned this year it is the power of the internet to support the growth of one's personal learning network (okay, a group of folks with whom to collaborate). When I first registered with Twitter, I was underwhelmed. I let it sit in my bookmarks, visiting it occasionally only to find nothing there. Well, I wasn't really that dense, so I started to ask a few questions amongst my network of technology support friends. An invite to follow a peer in another city got me going and now I find the tool positively addictive. I've also met (virtually) a good number of new contacts and benefited greatly from the links and 140 character ideas they have shared. I'm now following 56 people and have 49 following me, a set of numbers above the norm, but far fewer in both categories from some of the folks I follow. Of course, they seem to share a lot more than I do, something I need to work on in the new year.

I also started to make more intelligent use of Delicious. I've set up some key, keywords, and plan to present at a conference in February on making the best use of this tool to build not only an easily accessed database of your own personal bookmarks, but also determining a schema for how best to share with others in your PLN.

Our district use FirstClass as mail/conferencing system and I have used a third-party application to build our school district website. Recently, with the approval of our laptops for teachers project, I've use the built in tool provided by the FirstClass software to develop a webpage for the 24/7 project. Over time I expect to use it to show teachers a simple way to use their FirstClass account to build personal or class websites.

The plan over the next four weeks is to get a good start on the professional development activities for the 24/7 project. It was unfortunate that the weather impacted delivery of the MacBooks to the teaching staff, only 155 of the 210 got in their hands before Christmas, but, for the rest, consider the laptop a New Year's treat. Can you tell that this teacher loves her MacBook?