Teaching with Technology

Creating Community

sarahcooley — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:06:23 +0000

When I decided that I wanted to help teachers use technology and social media I had to come up with a plan. This is phase one of that plan. To create a community of teachers and educators who are passionate about learning new things, so that they can help spread this community to all of the other teachers in their schools and social circles.

Community is something I really believe in. I know that it has power. So what I would like you all to do it to tell all the teachers you know about this project. Especially teachers in the NYC area and let them know about our meetup group. We will be planning the first event very soon.

I also would like to know what you all would like to learn during these sessions, what challenges do you face in your school with technology? What road blocks are you hitting?

I would like to note that my goal for this group is to help educators use social and community building tools (not so much physical equipment) to engage students inside and outside of the classroom.

The over all goal of this project is to create a curriculum for teachers that can easily be brought into staff development days and distributed through online video.

The inspiring video that started it all

sarahcooley — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 01:22:22 +0000

This video was produced by the Consortium for School Networking.

Founded in 1992, the Consortium of School Networking (CoSN) is the premier professional association for school district technology leaders. CoSN is committed to providing the leadership, community and advocacy tools essential for the success of these leaders. Their mission is to empower K-12 school district technology leaders to use technology strategically to improve teaching and learning.

Some of my favorite points from the video:

Education was ranked the lowest industry in IT intensiveness!

Kids are rich content developers!

Every turned off device is potentially a turned off child!

We live in a “nearly now” space.

We have a classroom system when we could have a community system!

Teaching with Technology

sarahcooley — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 04:27:24 +0000

Hello everyone, I’m Sarah Cooley. I started this blog to have a central place to publish things about the meetup group and other teaching with technology tips.

The goal of the meetup group is to help teachers create online communities and social spaces for their classes, in order to engage students outside of the classroom.

It revolves around the idea that one aspect of learning is the sharing of information, both from teacher to student and from student to student. The web has great tools for sharing and sharing online is a culture with which students are already familiar.

We want to show teachers the potential of these online tools and together develop ways to incorporate them into any curriculum.

I also started a twitter account for the group. @teachwithtech