Playing With the Cool Kids: My Teaching Twenaissance

This year I begin my twelfth year as a pro­fes­sional edu­ca­tor. I like to think of myself as ener­getic and enthu­si­as­tic about my pro­fes­sion and I still believe that it is noble, but I would be lying if I didn’t admit to feel­ing a lit­tle burned out lately. In addi­tion to my teach­ing role I have been the act­ing (if not offi­cial) tech­nol­ogy coör­di­na­tor for the school, dili­gently attend­ing work­shops and con­fer­ences, teach­ing teach­ers, and wav­ing pom-poms for inte­gra­tion. But lately I have felt that no one else is cheering.

As is my wont, I adopted Twit­ter early on, after hear­ing a buzz about it in nerdy cir­cles. I had a very hard time dis­cov­er­ing its use­ful­ness, and aban­doned it almost com­pletely for nearly a year. After all, who wanted to hear about the minu­tia of my daily life…@MrR0g3rs “now I’m in line @ Wal-Mart.”? I’m not sure what it was that brought me back to the bird but I think it was when I decided to click the ubiq­ui­tous “fol­low me” but­ton on the “Free Tech­nol­ogy for Teach­ers” web­site.  I then decided that I should hit the “fol­low me” but­ton on all of the web­sites that I sub­scribed to.

I sat back and watched the con­ver­sa­tion for a while and real­ized that this was a col­lec­tion of really cool peo­ple who were like me, pas­sion­ate about edu­ca­tion and tech­nol­ogy. Beyond just being inter­est­ing, I instantly learned that this group was also will­ing and eager to share every­thing that they knew or learned. They answered ques­tions rang­ing from deep philo­soph­i­cal queries to how many cups of cof­fee they had con­sumed that day. And they let me play, right away. They answered my ques­tions and thanked me for my input. This group of great pro­fes­sion­als newly ener­gizes me and I am telling every­one I see about its use­ful­ness and poten­tial. I heart my PLN (Per­sonal Learn­ing Net­work), thanks for my teach­ing twe­nais­sance. Want to fol­low the cool kids your­self, look who I’m fol­low­ing.