Life-Changing

This year has been life-changing for me. I have entered the technology world and there is no turning back. On September 8th I sat in the Reed Theater at Fredericksburg Academy and started a journey that would change how I look at the world, how I teach and how I learn.

I became part of an International PLP in which I get to interact with other educators all over the world. We participate on a ning site with educators from the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. I remember sitting in that first f2f meeting and thinking, “Huh?” It was overwhelming, especially because I was only two weeks into school and hadn’t gotten my “school legs” yet. But I quickly found that the International PLP was going to give me just what I needed, a learning network to make myself a better learner and teacher.

The best part of the network for me was that they gave me permission to NOT use the tools I am learning in the classroom yet. My assignment was to simply use the tools in my own learning as an educator and go from there. That was refreshing for me and proved to be just the advice I needed.

Since September I have found a way to have an awesome learning network of people all over the world. I have tweeted twittered posted 367 tweets on twitter, posted numerous responses on our PLP ning, joined a Foreign Language Ning, called into a radio show on the CBC about edtech, tagged away on delicious, joined a K-12 online conference Elluminate session, watched numerous conferences online that happened in Canada and elsewhere, took a photo a day for a month on flickr and found a network of people who would help me learn as an educator.

I can’t recall a time when I have learned so much in such a short period of time, and yet it just opened up a world of things yet to learn. Of course, I have changed not only how I learn, but also have changed many things I do in the classroom with my students. I hope to share in this blog, my thoughts, ideas, trials and tribulations, successes and ”learning experiences”.