I am the facilitator of our ‘Digital Leaders’ group. We are a group of volunteers representing various grades and departments who are willing to take risks, try new technology, model good practice, share our learning and help our colleagues to join us in using technology to amplify learning. We meet monthly and I look forward to every meeting. As a group we are reading What Connected Educators do Differently by Todd Whitaker, Jeffrey Zoul and Jimmy Cassas. I spent ages trying to choose a book for us to read together. I’ve been very pleased with the choice so far.

In our last meeting we discussed chapter 1 of the book: Key Connector 1: Invest in a Personal and Professional Learning Network. At the end of the chapter there is a To-Do list encouraging the reader to ‘Follow 5 educators who are leaders in investing in their own learning networks, Find 5 resources we have shared, which helps you to create and maintain your own learning network, and Take 5 specific action steps which set the wheels in motion for becoming a connected educator.’

Our group discussed how Twitter has changed us as educators. We talked as well about feeling overwhelmed by Twitter–there’s just too much good stuff. How do we balance it all? How do we not get sucked into too many ideas and focus on finding just what we need? It’s so easy to get distracted. Imagine how our students feel? We talked about how to introduce Twitter to our colleagues who aren’t using it. Our conclusion at the end was to agree to use our #BISLearns as much as we can and to highlight and celebrate those moments in our weekly staff meetings. This will give the reluctant teachers on staff a way to see Twitter being used and encourage them to have a look and maybe have a go. I’ve added the #BISLearns feed to the intranet home page for Primary School so families start seeing it as well. We’ve also agreed to use our shared Documenting Learning blog to highlight the good things we find on Twitter to again model and share it with our colleagues.

I love this group of teachers and I especially love the professional dialogue we have in our meetings. Even though we meet in the last period of the day, we walk away with new ideas and shared momentum. Work with the willing and reap the rewards!