Oh boy, here it is!

Soooo…my colleagues have heard all the reasons I haven’t or couldn’t blog. This week Will Richardson told me “can’t often means won’t.” I have also declared virtually and in person that my next step in my 21st century leadership journey is to post on my blog…so here it is.

Lots of great learning this week. Lucky to have Will Richardson join in our learning this week as a critical friend. I’m not sure that he “comforted the agitated” but I think he definitely “agitated the comforted.”

One of my worries when educators talk about needing technology to engage students is thast the use of technology equates to digital worksheets. After seeing Twitter explode this weekend with #ADSBlearns, I see that our teachers don’t want that either. The power of 21st century learning is the networks and connections we can make.

Example

Kerri Grasley tweets about her class connecting with ISO honey bee experts; I retweet; I start following Pam Moran (as suggested by Will Richardson; Pam quotes tweet to her staff (they have a pollination project) and now their bee class in Virginia is going to connect to Kerri’s class virtually. How cool is that!?

Without knowing it, Kerri has contributed to my leadership journey in 2 ways:

1. By being a connected teacher she allowed me to see the power of Twitter and 21st century learning and ultimately how easy it was to connect.

2. She provided me with something to blog about.

Connecting “Connected” Aspiring Leaders

I am working with a group of aspiring leaders this weekend  and part of our work this session is connecting leaders within their own professional learning network and connecting them to other connected leaders.  As it often happens in education, the teacher becomes the learner…

In reality, this is an opportunity for me to reconnect with my own professional learning networks.  I asked candidates to search for connected leaders from our board and oops up came my name and my blog.  This is when I realized that I have not blogged in almost year and I only have one post-yikes.

So here goes attempt number 2 at modelling being a connected leader….