Personal Learning Networks for Every Teacher a Worthy Goal

Life is making it difficult to find time to read and consequently it becomes difficult to blog. This month (16, 17) I will attend a two day conference with Alan November and so I hope I can blog life from there. This weekend I got a little time to catch up with my bloglines account and one of Will’s posts struck a note with me. ( Clearly it did so for many other because there are 45 comments and I did not get a chance to go through them)

Will says…

“We go back and forth in this community about whether teachers who use blogs should blog, or podcast or read RSS feeds. I’ve always hesitated to come down on one side or the other in that debate for a variety of reasons. But it’s become clear to me that the answer has to be yes. If you are an educator, I think you have little choice but to choose option 3 in the Marco Torres mantra: “You can complain, quit or innovate.” I know in many ways it stinks to have to be an educator at a moment in history when things are changing on a glacial scale. But what you signed up for is preparing kids for their futures. You have little choice but to deal.”

Further on he writes

“you have the “greatest library in human history” at your fingertips. You have a billion potential teachers. You have an opportunity to learn in ways that you or I could not even have dreamed of when we were in school. And you have an opportunity to shepherd your students into a much more complex, much messier, and much more profound world of learning in ways that will help prepare them more powerfully for the world they face.”

Will’s words ring true and are a great source of encouragement to me. They have renewed my zeal to continue the project I started back in September. I am struggling with having the staff populate their bloglines accounts and write in their blogs. We started this activity, building Personal Learning Networks, over a month ago but it has not yet taken root. It seems that there is always something that keeps us to busy. Right now it is Report Cards and Parent Teacher Conferences. Because I understand the workload the staff carries I have tried to build time into our scheduled faculty meetings for them to read and blog but alas it has been hard. My hope is that if I can make it a regular part of our agenda it will become a habit and as it bears fruit it will take on a life of its own.

I think maybe Will’s post should be required reading….

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