Learning- Live!

This week brought us many new tools. For our Thursday class, my group used a Skype group chat, which, interestingly enough, many of us had never done. It worked out fairly well, though we lost Alison a few times. But it was easy to just call her back and add her in. I was Skyping from my netbook, which I never tried before, and, again, the Skype in Linux worked fine.

I thought Deb our guest speaker was a fine proponent of creating Personal Learning Networks (though she's got to get on gaining more followers). In the beginning, though, I'm finding that many newbies to Twitter are not adding their own resources, but they are still following folks. Even the classroom discussion, our class mentioned that some of them didn't feel they had a lot to share or offer to a network or on a blog. I hope that's not true of education as a whole, or we have a lot of work to do.

Listening to some of the classroom talk, they are starting to make efforts to building their PLN, and that's encouraging to hear, although I can still hear some hesitation in their voices. What's the big deal? It makes me think about a conversation I had with a co-worker. I was trying to get her to present with me at a conference, because we had, together, made some discoveries about using Web 2.0 tools with the ESL students. She was scared straight. She said that she had no problem talking to students, but was very nervous talking to peers. Are there other teachers that are making breakthroughs with students, but aren't sharing those because they are afraid of being judged by their peers?

I think that it might be interesting to know that there's this whole class of teachers who do amazing things with their students, but are too scared to tell others. Just doing their job- then going home.

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