Just a Tweet? Or, So Much More?

As I mentioned in my previous blog, I never realized the potential of Tweeting in regards to professional development.  I have learned so many ways that Twitter can benefit me as an educator just by being part of the Twitter community for only a few days.  I have also explored some very interesting and informative articles that enhanced my knowledge of twitter as a professional learning network.   Ways Teachers Can Use Twitter for Professional Development and The Teacher's Guide to Twitter are two very in depth articles that walk educators through the various uses of Twitter for educational purposes as well as how to use the different Twitter tools correctly.  I feel that Twitter will provide me with many opportunities to connect with current and experienced educators in my field of ESL as well as allow me to share my own ideas about teaching.  One thing that both of these articles touched on was the idea that Twitter is a "two way street," it is giving and taking of ideas and resources.  This means that it is a learning community where people with shared interests can learn from each other and their experiences.

This is especially important for new and future educators; I know that I feel very fortunate to have a social learning network such as Twitter where I can connect with experts in the field of teaching ESL and ask for advice for my future classroom.  I also enjoy and find beneficial just following educators' tweets and connecting to their resource links such as teaching sites and articles.  I am still very new to Twitter and need to learn more about how to use it and get the most out of it for professional purposes, but so far I am enjoying what it has to offer me as a future educator.

#tweetsareeducational!!

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How in the world could Twitter be beneficial for me as an educator? That is a question many might ask  when told that Twitter is a good tool to use for professional development, and that is the exact question I asked myself when I signed up for the account as part of my educational technologies course.  Up until now I was completely against Twitter; that could be because I only knew it as a means for common everyday people to implicitly stalk their favorite celebrities, and well, as a means for celebrities to get instant attention.  But this view changed when I began to explore the varied uses of Twitter and I attended my first Twitterchat, #edtechchat.  This chat was very informative for me as an educator as it consisted of teachers, students, and other educators posting informative sites and tips on using technology in education as well as information on how to improve the general educational system of today. There was some conversational dialogue happening during this chat as others would comment on and reply to others' tweets, but the majority of the chat was people posting about different educational topics and linking useful sites to their tweets, which I found to be very useful.  I visited one site in particular connectlearningtoday.com, and read an awesome article on using the virtual learning tool augmented reality in the classroom.  Overall, I felt my first Twitterchat for educational purposes provided me with a wealth of information that will help with my future teaching. This experience also showed me that Twitter is indeed a good tool to use for professional development as it helps me to connect with other educators and share ideas and resources.

Flipped Learning Through Social Networking

One thing I have learned from my LAI technologies class is the importance and usefulness of social networking, especially for learning from and through others and their experiences.  There are numerous social networking sites out there that provide people with information and tools to help them advance and be successful in their careers, in particular their teaching career.  One social networking site that I have just explored and joined is the Flipped Learning Network.  I was attracted to this site in particular because I am very interested in learning how to incorporate individualized teaching into my future L2 English classroom.  This teaching method is also very similar to learning how to incorporate individual learning styles and interests into the curriculum, which is a very important and useful teaching method to help facilitate learning in the ESL classroom.
 The Flipped Learning Site is useful for current and future teachers of all areas because it gives educators a forum to share their best flipped teaching practices and also share things that did not seem to work in the classroom; therefore providing current and future teachers with tools that will benefit students as well as with practices that are not useful for students.  I feel that joining this site now during my studies, will allow me time to read up and research some more on how to best implement successfully and efficiently this teaching strategy into my future classroom.  I look forward to all I will learn from educators through this site.

Keeping Up With Today's Learner

A learner of today is like a chameleon who is constantly changing his color to adapt to and survive in a constantly changing environment.  The learner of today is constantly changing his/her ways of thinking and learning to keep up with all the new knowledge that is surfacing so often in today's world. In his article A Learning Theory for the Digital Age George Siemens refers to the concept of half-life knowledge and how it relates to today's learner.  New knowledge is being born so often in today's world, such as technological advances and social learning environments, that people have to constantly change the the ways they think and the decisions they make due to this constant influx of new knowledge.  However, though learner's today are considered "digital natives," those who grew up learning from and through technology, educational systems still emphasize  and practice learning theories that are only concerned with the actual process of learning and "not with the value of what is being learned."
In his brief video, The Conflict of Learning Theories with Human Nature, Siemens elaborates on the problem of educational systems today limiting the way they present information to today's learner based mainly on past theorist's ideas and research.  In this video he explains that it is human nature to make sense of the world around us by externalizing our thoughts, and that through this process meaning is being created and learning is happening.  For today's learner the way they externalize their thoughts and learn is through technology. And connecting with others through technology such as with online specialized learning communities are important activities that allow students to learn through others and from their experiences.  But as Siemens states, educators today have failed to keep up with today's

learner and adapt their ways of teaching and presenting information to meet the ever changing learning environments of these learners:  "To begin to see the power of connecting in an external fashion really requires that we rethink and rewrite much of how we'er currently conceiving  learning and knowledge in our academic settings."

So Much More Than Just Bookmarking

When I would hear the term social bookmarking I would simply think, just a way to save some of my favorite sites on my computer and have easy access to them at a later date.  What was missing from my basic definition of the term was the social aspect of social bookmarking.  I never realized how much bookmarking can become a shared community of favorite topics and interests until I explored two social bookmarking tools for my LAI technologies course, Diggo and Scoop.it.  Diggo is an excellent way to not only save some of your favorite and important sites, but to organize them through the use of tags.  The purpose of a tag is to allow you to search out only the sites you saved that are tagged with that specific key word; for example esl.  Diggo also offers many other extra features such as being able to highlight specific parts of articles and use electronic sticky notes which allows you to write and take notes anywhere on a web page.  Scoop.it is much like diggo as it allows you to save your favorite sites and articles, however diggo allows you to organize your interest sites by topic.  So all you have to do is click on the topic of the articles you would like to share or read and it will take you to all of the articles you saved under that topic.  Both of these websites allow you to follow other users who post articles and topics of personal interest, however scoop.it gives suggestions for related articles.  I thought it was

easier to learn how to use diggo than scoop.it, however once I got the hang of scoop.it I figured I would probably get more use out of that site.  I like how scoop.it allows me to organize sites and interests based on topic.  I feel being able to use social bookmarking sites is essential in today's technological world, especially the teaching world.  Teachers can find so many educational tools and successful teaching methods by searching the internet and we need a way to organize, save and share all of the important information we collect for our own personal teaching. Both diggo and scoop.it are two ways to successfully do all of those things and more.

Educational Paradigms and Technology

For this post I viewed two very informative videos on teaching in today's educational system.  The first video that I viewed was RSA-Animate: Changing Educational Paradigms and the second was classroom of tomorrow.  I really enjoyed both of these videos, not only were they unique and engaging but they were very informative both in their own ways.

The first video, RSA-Changing Educational Paradigms really made me think about how todays educational system has become so obsessed with teaching to the test that it is actually effecting the health and well-being of the children who are subjected to this approach to teaching.  I have always been weary about labeling children, especially with learning/behavioral disorders in which the solution involves medications/treatments.  This video makes an excellent point that so many children today are being labelled with ADHD, almost as if administrators and educators use this diagnoses as a means of medicating children in order to make them focus and calm them down, in order to meet their objectives and make reaching the teaching standards easier.  I also strongly agree with the point this video makes on divergent thinking.  Students today are being taught, because of the educational standards currently set in place, that there is only one answer to questions and problems and in order to succeed in school they have to accept and remember that one answer.  Divergent thinking on the other hand, teaches that there could be many possible answers to one question and lots of possible ways of interpreting a question.  This is the educational paradigm that is emphasized in this video.

The second video, Classroom of Tomorrow, was a very interesting musically narrated video that shows how technology has infiltrated today's classrooms.  While a lot of the technological tools displayed in this video seemed very convenient and great to facilitate learning, this video gave me the feel that technology has also made learning in the classroom very impersonal. Everyone in the video, including teachers were constantly looking down at their devices and not at anyone around them.  I agree that using technology in todays classroom is almost essential and does facilitate learning to a degree, but I also feel that using technology should not interfere with classroom pedagogy or with communication among classmates and group work; all very important aspects of learning and classroom dynamics.

Both of these videos really made me stop and think about how I will teach my classroom; the types of technology I will use and the types of lessons that I feel will most benefit my students in the long run.  I highly recommend current and future teachers to view both of these videos.

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I never realized the potential of blogging, and its educational benefits until I started taking LAI 590: Technologies in the L2 Classroom.  I have never used a blog before but just using it a couple times I can already see how it can be beneficial for my professional development as an educator and for the learning development for my ESL students. I  learned a lot from the articles I read this past week, "Blogging in Language Learning" by Rita Zeinstejer and "Seven Reasons Teachers Should Blog" by Steve Wheeler.
I cannot wait to use blogging as a means to educate myself on ways to becoming a  more effective and efficient teacher in the L2 classroom.  Now that I am becoming more familiar with the blogging community I see myself  searching for blogs that give advice on teaching ESL and that provide links to different sites and learning tools for my students.  I would love to read and comment on current ESL teacher's blogs and learn from their teaching experiences.  Once I am teaching I think I will definitely use blogs as a way of posting assignments and lesson plans for my students and as a way to allow my students to get to know me and their classmates on a more personal level.  I feel that in order to be comfortable in the ESL classroom, where cultures are so diverse, it is essential to give students the opportunity to get to know each other in other environments outside of the classroom; I feel forming an online blogging community will meet that need.  According to Zeinstejer, blogs can do all these things and more.
Upon reading and learning about blogs this past week I realized that they meet a lot if not all of the NYS Learning Standards for All Subjects including English as a Second Language.  In the specific field of ESL two of the main standards blogs meet are:  Language for information and understanding, in which through blogging students will acquire, interpret, apply and transmit information for content area learning and personal use; and language for social interaction.
NYS learning standards/ESL