Professional Online Community

For my Technology in Education course with the MAT program, I was asked to take part in an online social networking community. I chose to join the Edutopia: Improving Public Schools online forum. This was a great way for me to plug into the many blogs and public forums available to individuals who create their own accounts. Once you have your account set up, you are able to take part in many different threads of communication with multiple different topics being discussed. I joined the Brave New World for Middle School teachers thread.

I found this networking to be full of wonderful ideas, unfortunately, many answers or comments came much later than I had hoped. This is a great way to interact with other teachers nationwide, however, I would suggest using it only for advise and not to rely on the responses of others to guide lesson planning unless you are planning weeks in advance. I learned this the hard way, when hoping for some advice, only to receive responses weeks later. It was a good place to share ideas, vent about frustrating situations, and to seek advise about just about anything educational. I posted a thread asking for advice about coral reefs, and several responses later, I had found a wonderful idea for building artificial reefs in Alaskan waters.

This was a good opportunity see a professional social networking community first hand. I was a recipient of several good ideas, and also learned to be patient when waiting for responses.