Professional development - up close and personal

Last week the #AsiaED slow chat on Twitter, which was moderated by Simon Youd, discussed personalised professional development & professional learning (PD/PL) for teachers. This week Simon is continuing to moderate, but with a different approach, and has set the challenge of creating a post, video, or podcast reflecting on last week's chat. 

By coincidence, it is now exactly 12 months since I started blogging, and so this is an ideal time for me to reflect on the impact blogging has had on my PD/PL over the last year, and whether it will continue to have an impact in the future. My original plan was to blog for a year, just to see if I could write and share my thoughts and reflections on a fairly regular basis. I've managed to do this, averaging over two posts per month on my blog. 

In addition to writing for my own blog, I've also written a number of guest blog posts for other sites, for example here. Contributing posts to community blogs, rather than just to my own, has resulted in some great feedback from teachers around the globe. Sites like BAM Radio Network's EdWords blog, Innovate My School.com, and Pedagoo.org, are all great places to submit pieces to. 

A number of contributors to last week's #AsiaED chat mentioned the importance of creating content, rather than simply being passive consumers of content. This is something that is increasingly recognised as being important for our learners, so why not for us as educators too? I have found blogging to be a useful way to reflect on my practice - what works, what doesn't - and use these reflections to hopefully improve my practice moving forward. So, whilst it began as a bit of an experiment, I plan to continue blogging for the foreseeable future.

Although writing blogs can be time-consuming, I've found I am getting slightly quicker at it. I was also concerned to begin with that I would find it difficult to find material to write about, and occasionally I do publish the odd photoblog! However, another important change for me this year was when, in May, I signed up to Twitter. Since then, interactions and conversations I have had on Twitter have provided inspiration for many of my blog posts, for example here. 

In fact, apart from when I studied for my Masters in Education, Twitter has provided me with the most useful PD/PL I have experienced since becoming a teacher. Education chats on Twitter, such as #DitchBook, #INZPirED, and of course #AsiaED, have proved particularly helpful. There are many educators using Twitter who are incredibly supportive and generous, both with their ideas and resources. So again, Twitter, which for me started out as something of an experiment, will continue to be one of my main go-to places for PD/PL.

Other ways for personalising professional development obviously include attending relevant education conferences. In the last 18 months there have been a couple of useful conferences held locally that I've attended, and these have been helpful. I also gave a presentation at the recent Google in Education Summit here in Bangkok. 

So to summarise, I feel that blogging has helped with my professional development, by providing a concrete way with which to reflect on my teaching. Participating in Twitter education chats has also given me much to think about in terms of PD/PL, as well as a very supportive and helpful PLN. In the coming year I plan to continue blogging, both on my own site and for community blogs, as well as continuing to participate in Twitter education chats. 

I'd be interested to hear others' views on their most effective PD/PL...

Digital citizenship week

This week at my school we are holding our first digital citizenship week. Some colleagues and myself felt this was necessary given the amount of time our students now spend online. The timing was ideal, since we have just produced an acceptable use policy for technology, which was distributed at a recent Parents' Day. Ideally, of course, digital citizenship would be a routine part of all classes where technology is prevalent or widely used. However, we felt that it was important to raise the profile of this topic, so digital citizenship week was born. 

Throughout the week, a number of teachers have volunteered to turn their subject classes over to lessons around digital citizenship. In this way, each grade level will each receive a lesson about a particular aspect of digital citizenship. For example, I will be delivering a lesson around over-sharing online, based in part on materials from a very helpful organisation, Common Sense Media. Other teachers will be discussing issues around digital footprints.

Although it seems self-evident that we should be educating our students in issues around digital citizenship, there are a few other aspects to consider. Digital citizenship means different things to different people. One definition from Teachthought.com is 'the self-monitored habits that sustain and improve the digital communities you enjoy or depend on'. There are also, however, some valid arguments made that digital citizenship is so fundamentally important that we should drop the 'digital' part entirely, and simply include it as part and parcel of citizenship education. Others have suggested that when we talk about digital citizenship, in the main we are referring to digital responsibility, a slightly different set of competencies, and when we talk of digital citizenship we should be encouraging learners to champion debate, justice, and equality via their online interactions. 

However we choose to term it, we have a responsibility to our learners to guide them and help them to negotiate cyberspace safely and responsibly. Although some people may refer to millennials as 'digital natives', can we really assume that they are instinctively equipped to deal with everything the connected world may throw at them? I'm not convinced that we can, and so for now at least I think that we need to continue raising the profile of digital citizenship until it does become part of the everyday classroom conversation. 

Blog Wednesday - A new initiative at my school

A few months ago I came across a great idea, Blog Friday, described by one of my Twitter PLN, Rory Gallagher. Inspired by this, last week I started Blog Wednesday at my school. The basic premise is that every Wednesday I will circulate one of the many interesting educational blog posts from the blogosphere to my colleagues. I will attach a brief commentary, and seek thoughts and opinions from my colleagues. 

Blog Wednesday at my school

The aim of this initiative will be to circulate blogs that are positive, reflect good classroom / school practice, or more general student / teacher well-being, as well as blogs about broader professional development issues. Sometimes the post may be topical, for example we are having a digital citizenship week soon, so I will circulate a blog post relevant to that topic. Sometimes I may circulate a post that is controversial, while other times it may simply be a post that is of interest to some or all of my colleagues. 

I teach biology in an English-speaking program for Thai students. Therefore the first post I chose for Blog Wednesday was about something all of my colleagues could relate to, bilingual education, by Dr Matthew Lynch. The post outlines five important features that a bilingual education can afford learners, such as improving lifelong learning skills, breaking down international language barriers, and improving collaboration. 

Amongst colleagues who responded to this initiative the feedback was positive. There were a couple of teachers who spoke to me about the idea, and four who replied to my email. Of the four who emailed responses, two colleagues wrote at length about theoretical studies of bilingual education they were aware of, and drew parallels with their own experiences as parents of young bilingual children. 

Why blog as an educator?

There are some great posts here by Amy Hollingsworth and here by Jessica Lifshitz which outline many reasons why blogging can be helpful for educators. Since I began this blog at the end of last year, I have personally found it to be an extremely useful way to reflect on and to develop my own practice as an educator. During that time I have also written various other posts for different blog sites, which is another great way to gain ideas from leading educators. I have collaborated with top UK ed-blogger Rachel Jones for her blog, been invited to post at BAM RadioNetwork EdWords blog by education author Rae Pica, contributed to InnovateMySchool.com, and even been quoted in The Guardian!

I plan to continue blogging myself for the foreseeable future. I also aim to continue with the Blog Wednesday initiative for the rest of this semester and the next, through to the end of this school year. After that, maybe more of my colleagues will be blogging too!

Social media use among high school students - is it a useful way to set up a learning blog?

Which social media platforms are most popular with students? Clearly most, if not all, of our students are using social media of one kind or another, and for a variety of reasons. I hope to utilise social media as a tool for engaging learners, and for setting up a learning blog, so it seemed logical to find out which platforms are most popular, then use that knowledge to proceed with my plans.

I carried out a survey of upper high school students (Grades 10-12) in the Maths-Science stream at my school. The survey instrument was administered using a Google Form. 

Out of a possible 70 students, 64 responded, and the results are shown below. These results show all social media platforms used by each student who responded.

The most popular social media platform among students was Line, with 94% of respondents reporting that they used it. Originally developed in Japan, Line is very popular here in southeast Asia. This was followed by Facebook (86%), then Instagram (64%). Twitter proved to be much less popular (27%), as did Google+ (20%). 

My original thinking before carrying out this survey was to use social media in order to encourage my students to discuss and reflect on what they have learned each week. Essentially it will be a kind of informal learning blog. I decided to use Facebook for this purpose, as it is clearly popular with students, and I feel it lends itself better to what I want to achieve than Line. I have set up a class Facebook page, which I have asked students to join. (I do not accept friend requests from my students, so the page is strictly limited to classroom-related activities). 

Each week I plan to ask one student, at random initially, to post a brief summary of what we learned in class that week. I will then encourage other students to discuss with each other what they feel they have learned, and hopefully help each other out with any areas of concern. I will also participate and use the students' posts as part of my formative assessment. 

However, the class Facebook page has been up for a couple of weeks now, and there hasn't been a huge amount of enthusiasm shown by students to engage with it. This may be because it is still early days. It may also be because they know I will be participating, and even though I have stressed that it is a safe (i.e. grade-free) space, they may still be reluctant to share openly in such a forum. 

There is another possible reason. As I mentioned earlier, I do not become Facebook friends with students - as much as anything, I want Facebook to be a place where I can interact with friends and family without a work aspect to it. My students have various ways they can contact me, for example via email or our LMS. Therefore it may simply be that my students also view Facebook as a leisure pursuit, and do not want it linked with school work to any great degree. 

I plan to continue with this trial for the rest of the semester - if it is still proving to be an unpopular way to conduct a learning blog I will try a different approach.