Am I Connecting with The Connected Educator?

I've arrived at the mid-term of CE5160, and these are my thoughts on the first five chapters of  The Connected Educator.

Chapter 1

One of the things that resonated the most with me in this chapter was the difference between cooperating and collaborating with colleagues, and how technology could play a role in my professional learning and practice. In March, just as the Grade 123 team was about to implement our week-long Service Learning Week (see one of the YouTube slideshows here), the Grade 1 teacher broke her wrist and was hospitalized before and after her surgery. Google docs was a critical component in our ability to organize and collaborate with her and the other Specialist teachers in the school, and it provided a means for the Grade 1 teacher to work together with us from her hospital bed as we combined our efforts to create an amazing curriculum.

Chapter 2

I think I mentioned in my VoiceThread comments that as a group, my CE5160 colleagues are collaborating in an activity even though we live and work in different time zones. I've also come to appreciate the diversity of the members of this class, and as I read their blogs, I find myself reflecting on their thoughts and ideas. And sites like Creative Commons (not mentioned in the chapter, but in keeping with the theme of group collaboration) allow people all around the world to share images in the public domain (like the connected globe I found) with others for free; this, therefore, contributes as another form of collaboration - offering others an opportunity to use an image or idea for their own project.

Chapter 3

While this chapter was rather short, I felt that the question posed, "What do you need to unlearn and relearn?" is a rather powerful thing to think about. And frankly, I know I have a lot to learn, especially about technology. Lately, I've been trying to learn more about BrainPop and how I can use it in my classroom, and so I've been learning more through webinars offered by BrainPop. And after watching one webinar on the Quiz Mixer, I developed a fractions quiz for my students. Soon, I'll have another quiz created, and my plan is to create about one new quiz per week through BrainPop to review concepts covered in the curriculum.

Chapter 4

While I've already mentioned how I used Google docs, or more properly, Google drive, to collaborate with a hospitalized colleague, I will admit that Chapter 4 left me thinking a great deal about I will be sharing the vision of the elementary school with new teachers, and how the current teachers are collaborating with the incoming teachers. My school created a ning site to welcome new teachers to KIS and in order to create relationships before we even meet each other face to face in August during teacher orientation week.

Chapter 5

The chapter mostly focused on Web 2.0 resources teachers can use in the classroom, and this course has required me create a Diigo account (and I'm starting to add some of the websites I bookmarked on my laptop so that I have these bookmarks available to me "in the cloud."). I'm also blogging - a feat that my friends back in the States find amazing since I tend to guard my privacy so carefully. I'm using Feedly now, and I have a link on my Firefox browser so that I can quickly access the site and scan article headlines to see what I might be interested in reading about on any given day. I'll be creating podcasts to complete my mid-term assignments, use the wikispace every week for this course, use Google drive almost daily at school, frequently check the KIS ning site for new teachers, and access TeachTube to find supplemental materials for my core academic classes.