How have connections with other professionals improved your practice? Today's entry is from Mark Van Over, Assistant Principal at La Costa Canyon High School:
Maintaining digital connections--no matter how small they may seem--has helped me immensely maintain a solid focus as an educator--both as a teacher and as an administrator.
One of my most fruitful endeavors came from something as simple as being a member of a listserv dedicated to AP U.S. History. Perusing the daily messages from my colleagues, nationwide, helped me to learn and grow as a new AP teacher. I was able to swap lesson plans and collaboratively create tests and to know that I wasn't in it alone. My students, as a result, benefited from this. They had lesson plans that were fun, innovative, and effective, and they had experiences that were richer than I might have devised on my own.
As an administrator, I have to say that Twitter has become a favorite of mine. While I am not as witty as my colleague when it comes to tweeting, I love reading the tweets from the organizations I follow. A favorite on my Twitter feed is Edutopia (they also have a website, edutopia.org). They constantly have links to easy things that teachers can use for anything from implementing the Common Core to effective formative assessment techniques to classroom management. I keep an archive of the helpful things I find so that I can point teachers in that direction as a means of enrichment. Another of my Twitter connections is the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). They have awesome articles from renowned experts in the field of education, and their tools lean toward the practical--meaning, it isn't always some lofty academic speak and is more about how teachers can use methods and use them quickly. The best part of this connectedness is that if it weren't for Twitter, and seeing various tweets from these organizations, I wouldn't necessarily think to go and check on my own. Twitter is what helps me keep current of issues that are of interest to my school and our students.
