Twitter PLNs: Geographical Isolation Doesn't Really Exist

I have been living overseas for 14 years now on four different continents.  It has been one exciting adventure after another, and most of the time, I wouldn't trade my life for the world.  However, when it comes to forming PLCs and learning with colleagues, the isolation can sometimes be overwhelming and in some cases a deterrent.  Sometimes I crave the world.  It's really a numbers game when you get down to it.  The sample size of educators in your physical proximity or even time zone that share in your specific passions and interest can be quite limited.  In most of the places I have taught, there were at most two schools with an even smaller group of teachers interested in learning about the same topics, pedagogical strategies, or technological tools to the depth that I wanted to go with my professional development.  In countries outside of the US, you frequently have to contend with language issues, cultural/educational barriers, and in places like India traffic and logistical difficulties. 

Kenya, December 2012

Relying on my biology metaphors, it can sometimes feel like I am an opportunistic predator (read educator) –always searching for the PD rich experience but always aware of the energy and motivation costs of the hunt.  It can be hit or miss, and I have found that localized PD experiences in my host countries can frequently be a miss.  Having said that, limiting my professional development to the small group of teachers that I work with in my physical space can be just as much of a miss for no other reason than the statistical significance of a small sample size.  What is the likelihood that I will find another teacher in my building who wants to explore iPad apps that will help me to better illustrate the movement of electrons and hydrogen ions in the electron transport chain during both the cyclical and non-cyclical light dependent reactions in photosynthesis for my 12th grade IB class or gamifying my chemistry unit for 10th grade? 

Another issue is technology.  It is impossible to stay abreast of every new app, tool, and resource that hits the market.  It is even more difficult in international schools if you don't have a critical mass of connected educators constantly sharing out resources that they have discovered outside of our little bubble.  The key word here is connected.  It is because of Twitter, that all of the issues mentioned above have completely disappeared for me in the past year. 

PLC or PLN?

Before I joined Twitter a year ago, PLC used to stand for Professional Learning Community.  It was the edupopculture (yes, I just made that word up) buzz word for your department, vertical team, grade level team etc.  It usually consisted of less than 10 people who shared a common goal, often a goal predetermined by the administrators dictating your meeting agendas.  PD was delivered and often watered down to address all grade levels and all disciplines.  In the international schools that I have worked at in the past, this frequently involved literacy or something more tool oriented like Atlas Rubicon.  My PLC time was often spent documenting what were already doing rather creating or discovering new ideas in uncharted territory.  Then I joined Twitter.

I have now expanded my PLC into a PLN.  Though it may look like only a difference in one letter, there were actually two major paradigm shifts that took place.  The obvious change is that I now have a network rather than a community.  Instead of being isolated by an ocean from other educators that share my vision and mission as an educator, I am now connected to them through my network.   

The second shift is more subtle on the surface, but has a far greater impact on my development as an educator.  Instead of a Professional Learning Network, I now refer to my PLN as my Passionate Learning Network.  Whenever I have time to explore or discover, I simply turn to Twitter.  In no time at all, I am connected to people who share in my passion for learning and offer far more insight and an endless stream of new ideas for me to dig into.  My world now looks a little more like this:

Image originally from eatrio.net via Reddit

This image came from a great post that you should check out:  40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World

Snapshot:  How do PLN's Work

So today, I went onto Twitter and one of my fellow Tweeps from California posted this:   

@davidtedu

My question was what is this ThingLink and why are you awake at 1:30 am California time?  So he responds: 

Hmmm....Note to self:  Check out ThingLink; it could be the answer to my photosynthesis dilemma.  What is #playdate13?   

Before I could ask him, another Twitter friend, @clongbh sent me the link to the Google site for the unconference that they are going to attend, Playdate Los Angeles.  After taking one look at the site, I felt the isolation creeping in...but only for a moment.  I was frustrated that I couldn't be there to participate and learn from the amazing educators that are participating in this creative playdate.  It then occurred to me that I can still participate by following the hashtag #playdate13 this evening as all of the people attending are connected educators and will be tweeting out resources and commentary throughout the event.  I suspect that several of the sessions will also be aired live via Google Hangouts.  Chris then invited me to a new Google+ Community that can answer all of the questions that I have about Thinglink and connect me to other educators using it in their classrooms.  

This just in:  While writing this post, I received this tweet:   

I do not follow ThingLinkEducation, but their search engine must have alerted them to the fact that I was tweeting about ThingLink so they sent me a link to their educator's toolkit and a Google presentation on 70+ Interesting Ways to Use ThingLink in the Classroom.  Need I say more?  Two minutes on Twitter, and I now have hours of exploring and creating to do with an instant support network made of people who are passionate enough about ThingLink to share their expertise.  I am definitely looking forward to digging deeper when I finish this post.  If you are still not convinced, or not sure how to get started, here are some previous posts that I have written about using Twitter for professional development. 

What it Means to be a Connected Educator 

Twitter for Professional Development Series  

Update:  I received these two tweets from @CoffeeNancy after sharing this post on Twitter.   

Myth Busters: Summer Slide and The Loss of Learning

So I had this great evil plan to destroy the confidence of my grade 12 IB Biology students on the first day of school today ... with the intention of developing great strategies to start the year of course :-)  My 12th graders had returned from a very restful summer filled with very little biology revision (I suspect).  It is crunch time, the final stretch before their exams in May, so I decided to start class with an activity to show them how little they remember from their first year of IB.  I divided them into two groups and assigned them to two white boards.  No smart phones, no computers, no syllabus, no prompts...just their collective bank of memories that were formed back in January of this year.   One group was told to diagram everything that happens in respiration (aerobic and anaerobic) outside of the mitochondria, and the other group was instructed to diagram everything that happens inside of the mitochondria during respiration.  I then loaded up a couple of the videos they had produced in an activity I had them do last year as a comparison of what they knew then to what they know now.  Turns out the answer was almost everything.  One group had zero mistakes, and the other had only one error in the sequencing of two of biochemical steps in glycolysis.  They remembered all of the terms, were able to distinguish reduced molecules from oxidized ones, and accurately described all of the products for all of the stages in both anaerobic and aerobic respiration.  Here is one of the drawings produced.  

Now in the past this had been a foolproof plan...but then last year, I approached the teaching of the material differently than before.  When planning the unit on Cellular Respiration, I paid careful attention to the type of activities that I had the students engage in along with the sequence and spacing of exposure to the content according the current neuroscience research on memory retention.  Eric Jensen recommends the following strategy for content exposure to maximize retention in his book, Teaching with the Brain in Mind: 

By following Jensen's schedule of learning exposure combined with the use of collaborative multimedia learning activities, particularly this one, I have to put this one in the win column.  We reviewed a couple of the videos that my students created for this assessment, and were surprised to find that one of them had over 650 views!  Even better, one of the students claimed that she was probably responsible for 100 of them while she was reviewing for her final, and it wasn't even her video!  I will definitely be rethinking my plan for teaching photosynthesis over the next couple of weeks.  It is pretty awesome walking away from day feeling this optimistic!  Maybe that other shoe won't drop! 

13 Hours and Counting...

This is always the worst part of the year for me.  After an amazingly restful summer in Colorado...

It is time for my yang twin – I'm a Gemini – to take over so that I can hit the ground running on my first day back which is incidentally in 12 hours and 50 minutes.  UGH!  Normally the change in scenery is enough to get the gears in my brain going...

 ...but not even the cows blocking my path on the sidewalk did the trick.   

Fortunately my saviors, Daniel Pink and Seth Godin, awakened the yin twin in me. 

If you haven't read   To Sell is Human by Daniel Pink, I highly recommend it.  If you are in a time crunch, here is Daniel Pink's To Sell is Human in Less than 10 Minutes .  In his discussion on clarity, he presents a sample case where he offers several guiding principles that resonated with me. 

1. Clarify others motives with two "irrational" questions.   He explains this questioning strategy in this post. 
   
2. Try a jolt of the unfamiliar.  
3. Become a curator. In the book, he references a post by Beth Kanter that does a great job of explaining how to become a curator of information.   
4. Learn how to ask better questions.  Again, he directs his readers to a link for a questioning strategy that will help you to ask better questions.   
5. Ask the Five Whys.  
6. Find the 1%.   (Still trying to figure this one out)
   

Though this chapter was about clarity, I found myself leaving it with more questions than I started with, as did many of the members in my virtual book club this summer.  It reminded me of this Regis University advertisement that I saw in the Denver airport this summer.  

 Then in Seth's blog today, he wrote about focusing on the colors rather than the numbers.  Read it. My summary would be the same length as his post :-) This also struck a chord with me as I suspect that one of the first things that we will do when I return tomorrow is look at data, such as IB scores, to develop our goals and strategies for the year.  This is ironic considering that we are in the middle of a paradigm shift in education, and if looking at the numbers will only get us better numbers, shouldn't we be looking at alternatives to standardized testing?  Shouldn't we be creating different assessments to measure student learning on the 21st century skills that serve as the focus of our teaching and learning?  What are the colors that I should focus on to take my teaching to the next level this year? 

So with 12 hours and 4 minutes left before I give complete control to yang, I will leave you to your reading, while the yin in me signs off to watch the Newsroom.