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Thursday, August 2, 2012

The Connected Educator

If I hadn't been reading the tweets and blogs in my own P.L.N (Personal Learning Network), I would have missed that the US Department of Education has deemed August as "Connected Educator Month."  I can assure you there were no emails about this from school and to the best of my knowledge, the NEA did not send out information about this initiative!  I have read a lot of references to student achievement and to teacher evaluations in my local paper; however, there has been nothing about this US Government month-long focus.

In reality, this "silent" initiative is pretty sad because as it stands now, those who are already pretty "connected" will likely become "more connected" and those who are "out of the loop," in terms of educational technology, will likely fall "farther behind!"  How sad it is that after many years of working hard to leave no children behind, the attributes of learning described long ago in the "Matthew Effect" of education now represents the growing disparity of teacher preparedness to use "Internet based connections" for both their own and their students' learning.

We can all agree to at least this:
There is a need for ALL teachers to create and use their own P.L.N
to grow professionally and support student learning in the 21st Century. 

So if by some chance you come across this blog post AND if you, like me, want to try to be "connected" when we start school in a few weeks, here are a few links I plan to read.  I will save my own P.L.N. for another post; however, you too can use these links to begin connecting!
Happy Connecting.

1)
 Department of Ed
Department of Education Site with some (I think) amazing links.  So far, I have only checked our a few.  I will be reading more. 

http://connectededucators.org/cem/
2)
The Learning Network - Teaching and Learning With The New York Times

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