Monday, February 2, 2009

Can I enhance communication and learning in a network of learners?

Last year I was lucky enough to be one of the Lead Teachers in the Otepoti ICT Cluster. I learnt so much during the year about enhancing teaching and learning with ICT. Mostly I learnt from working with the other Lead Teachers, the facilitator and the teachers at my school.

All of the Lead Teachers chose some aspect in our practice to focus on for the year, it was not about choosing an ICT skill and then changing our programme to fit additional learning in.
It was to ask the question, "What could help me to enhance what I am already doing in this area?".
Sometimes I only had a question, I had ideas about what I would like to do but didn't know how to do the things I wanted to do. That was where all of the wonderful people involved in our cluster came in. It seemed as though just as I was struggling with something or whenever I was in conversations with others, answers to my problems or questions could be found within the skills and knowledge of other people around me. You don't know what you don't know, thankfully other people do.

Now that I have a new opportunity to learn even more from the growing number of people I am working with, it occurred to me that I will be doing the most learning. This didn't seem fair and I thought there must be a way I can share this learning.
"Can I enhance communication and learning in a network of teachers?" could be my action research for 2009.
Having seen how effectively some of our amazing Lead Teachers used blogs to communicate learning with their classrooms I thought perhaps a blog would be a good way for all of the teachers in our cluster to see what each other are doing and learning in their classrooms. A blog can be used when it suits them and so that they can access what they are interested in by searching the blog.
Hopefully the blog will become a place where I can share and record all of the fantastic things I am seeing in our cluster and bring them to teachers in a way which is time efficient for them.
2009 the year of the blog.