Tuesday, May 13, 2014

The exhilaration of sharing

Last week was an amazing one for me! On Monday, Edutopia tweeted a link to my "letter to me on my first day of teaching." Then it was re-tweeted and re-tweeted. Over 500 people read my work by the time I checked in at lunch. By the end of the week, it had over 1,000 page views. I haven't had that many people read something I wrote since my local newspaper published my winning Arbor Day sentence in 1st grade! Sharing with that many other educators was amazing!

I dropped in on #idedchat later in the week and when the topic of holding kids accountable when working in groups came up, I linked to a self-assessment I created earlier this year. I hoped this form that I had found so useful would help someone else.

Another Idaho teacher was looking for pros and cons of different devices for a 1:1 initiative. I shared the Google doc my school has been using to organize our data about device choices with him (and the rest of my Twitter PLN). At least five people added on to the information I already collected. Some of the comments were absolutely invaluable for our analysis. The simple act of sharing improved upon my work!

Since I started my career in education, I always admired those teachers who were constantly sharing their work. I was impressed by their kindness and concern for others. Now I see that they benefited from sharing as well: sharing is exhilarating!

To better share with my fellow educators, I've created a page of classroom resources. There are only a couple things there now, but I'll add more soon. I hope that you can find something there that is helpful to you. And I'll keep you updated as I experiment and refine...

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