Twitter Fellow of the Week | Thinking Through My Lens

I treated myself to a walk on the beach today after a writing project meeting at the university. So instead of walking on the beach near where I live, I walked on the beach down the hill from the university. It was foggy and cool, a perfect day for thinking and reflecting.

As I was walking I was thinking about the meeting…a follow up to the Invitational Summer Institute (a 4-week intensive leadership institute in the teaching of writing)…and the structures that we need as learners to move along the continuum from novice to expert (with the endpoint constantly moving) and from follower to leader.

The structure of the Summer Institute (SI) is designed to immerse teachers in writing, researching, reflecting on their practice, and critical conversations about teaching and learning. The structure is strong and well built, based on the 40-year-old model developed by National Writing Project founder, Jim Gray.

This pier is also a carefully designed, well built structure made to withstand the battering waves of the Pacific Ocean and the relentless wind and sun. I love the way when you look through the pier it narrows and provides a window through the corridor of surf out to sea just like the SI helps teachers look carefully at policy and practice and then focus on instruction that best supports the students in front of them.

And some of the structures we depend on are organic like these cliffs.

They are shaped by the natural environment. I watched our SI participants create their own structures as well. They gathered this morning, organically, catching up with each other as we, as facilitators, finalized our last minute plans.

And then there are structures that are light and flexible, like this feather on the beach.

It makes me think of our Twitter Fellow of the Week. This playful use of social media supports more weight than you might imagine. While we originally saw this program as a way to connect to one another within our project by giving each other a glimpse into a week in the life of an SDAWP educator, it has proven to do more. When teachers use Twitter as a professional learning network, their interactions begin to impact their practice. Suddenly they are reading more professional articles about education, “listening in” to debates about policy and practice, getting and sharing ideas from others (within our site and beyond our site), and making their own classroom practice more visible.

Today we asked our SI 2013 cohort to sign up as Twitter Fellows…and starting tomorrow we will begin to get a glimpse into their lives. (You can follow @SDAWP_Fellow on Twitter) Those who are more confident on Twitter signed up first…but others are willing to dip a toe into this unfamiliar world of tweets and hashtags and mentions. And they have the rest of the SDAWP community who are happy to help…and the others in their cohort will also be “listening” on Twitter, ready to respond and retweet and favorite…so they won’t be hollering into the dark.

My beach walk today was quiet and introspective as I thought about all the structures I noticed…and those we use to support learners. Structures can help us stretch and reach and connect as we learn and grow. What structures support you? What structures support your students?

I Am a Connected Educator! (writetheworld.me)
SDAWP Reunion (judymko.wordpress.com)

Earlier in the week I posted about being a Connected Educator. Since then I’ve also been thinking about those educators who are connected but not yet putting their voices out in the digital space professionally. Lurker is the term I’ve heard to describe people who read on social media but don’t comment or post themselves. But lurker has such an evil sound to it–as though they lurk in order to gain information for underhanded reasons. In some ways they seem to me to be listeners, like those students in my classroom who are soaking everything up like sponges but can’t yet bear to raise their hand and make a public comment.

Like the students in my classroom, I suspect that those digital listeners will at some point begin to comment and post for themselves, they just aren’t ready…yet. And since I started this blog (almost three months ago), I have had many instances of people making comments about my content when I’ve had no evidence of their interaction. It feels a bit odd at first. Almost like someone is eavesdropping on a conversation that they are not participating in. But then again, I am making a choice to put my writing and thinking out in the public sphere. And whether people chose to comment or “like” my blog post is a decision for them to make. It also reminds me as a reader of blogs and other social media that I read substantially more than I comment or otherwise indicate my presence.

And I also know that sometimes it just takes the right condition to get someone to dip their toe into the social media waters. If you listen to the NWP radio show on being a Connected Educator you will hear Abby and Janis and Barb talk about getting started and how much it helps to have support, like when our SDAWP teachers take on the Twitter account as @SDAWP_Fellow for a week. (We adapted that idea from Sweden’s practice of having a citizen take on the country’s Twitter account.) It’s also like having Barb and Matt’s support when trying out blogging on our collaborative blog, SDAWP Voices.

Today for my #sdawpphotovoices photo-a-day I took a photo of what I thought was some kind of fungus making a silky white coating on the leaves of our hibiscus plant. When I posted it to Instagram and Twitter, I got a response from one of my colleagues from my school site via Twitter telling me that this “fungus” was in fact white flies. I knew my colleague had a Twitter account, but she seldom tweets. I do try to nudge my colleagues when I see something that I think will interest them by “mentioning” them on Twitter. (I know I’m more likely to respond when someone “elbows” me and points me to something that has been posted.) I did this on Friday with my colleague when I saw an app I thought she might find interesting. And she acknowledged that tweet by replying. And then today, without a nudge, she shared valuable information with me about my plant.

There are stages to being connected. Most people start slow (I know I did) and then work up to more active participation. For most of us that’s how we learn to do a lot of things. We watch, we listen, we test, we get some feedback and then continue to increase our confidence and participation–or abandon that thing altogether. As educators we can’t afford to abandon digital literacy or being connected educators, but it isn’t necessary to jump in the deep end. There are lots of support systems out there.

In what ways are you connected? What is the one thing you will do in the next week to increase your connectedness? Will you comment on a blog? Respond to a tweet? Tweet a link to an interesting article or blog post? Start a Twitter account? (You are welcome to follow me @kd0602) I’d love to know if you are willing to post your goal as a comment!

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