I resisted for a long time but have recently put myself 'out there' so to speak. No, I am not online dating; still happily married but, I am working at creating an online professional learning network. I am the first to admit I don't know sweet tweet about twitter; hash had a totally different meaning to me but I'm twit chatting now! It isn't as though I was never interested in social networking as an educational tool but, I was also scared. Not so much by my digital infancy but more by my addictive personality. I don't mean gambling and substance abuse, I mean that I can't pick up a book and just read a chapter, if I am into it I will stay up all night to finish it. I bought the boxed set DVD's of the first 3 seasons of "Criminal Minds" to keep me occupied after recovering from surgery and had watched them all within a week! (This explains my heightened sense of paranoia and suspicion of serial killers among us!) So you might see why I could become even more hooked on my aptly nicknamed 'crackberry' than ever! But, I did it, jumped in with both feet. Wednesday night, from the bleachers during one of my daughter's 3 hour training sessions at gymnastics, I participated in a chat with folks from all over the place about supporting new teachers and developing their passion while nurturing ours #passiondriven #ntchat WOW! I'll admit, I was more a voyeur than a participant but what an unbelievable group of teachers were there, sharing and supporting eachother. It kind of blew my mind and took it off the bleacher bum for awhile too!
Yesterday, I was one of 12000 Saskatchewan Teachers who took part in a rally/study day walkout. The first interruption of service in 76 years! At the rally we were read letters of support from other teaching organizations across the country and twitter was a tweeting (as was I!) When you think about teachers and what we do and the fact that folks would be tweeting about how to do more, how to do better, how to be better and how to support others in this endeavour day and night, on their own time, because they care, I say that is passion! Not overtime, not extra-curricular, just personal professional development and networking to do the best for your students and your colleagues! How amazing is that! So, to all those SK residents who think teachers are lazy, have too many holidays, not enough hours etc, etc. I say, get your tweet on, check out what's happening online or, better yet, step into a school, spend a week with a teacher, discover what it is really about! And, for my teacher friends, I say get networked up, I think it may be worth it (although no guarantees about the addiction thing, I've been checking the twitter for crackberry every 10 min or so to make sure I didn't miss something...it is kind of overwhelming!)
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