Naturally, while deciding what online community to join, I tried to keep in mind the qualities that are most important to my completion of the MMP, as well as other values I have as an educator.
First, I wanted a community that has a relatively large membership and one that has many people posting discussions every day. These insure that any advice I would need for the project would be quickly addressed and that I would receive input from multiple people.
Second, I wanted to make sure that the community had the sole purpose of promoting Science education, and emphasized the importance of research based methods over pushing for some political agenda.
Third, I wanted to find something that someone I know is a member of and that they have found helpful for getting new ideas for their classroom.
Oh... and it has to be free.
While considering all of these things, the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) seems like a reasonable place to start. In quickly browsing some of the discussion posts, I saw that many of them were updated earlier that day, and that there were many members online as I was looking. It was also recommended by a co-worker of mine who I know is an innovator on using multi-media in her science classes, and she has attended a few of their conferences as well. Also, where they do have online courses and professional development options that cost money, community membership as well as many other resources are free.
While I don't have many details on how I want to incorporate multimedia, I know that I want the process to be very student centered and somehow stem off of a lab experiment.
Benjamin, I like your idea about joining an online Science teacher community. I have not yet picked a community to join, but I am thinking about looking for an online English community. Like so many teachers, I find myself constantly turning to online tools to help me in my classroom. Recently, I have been using http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/ to help me find supplements for the assignments I use based around novels that I am teaching. I like to change my assignments from year to year, and it is a great place to go to find new materials. Plus, I feel like I am supporting other teachers when I purchase something. As a teacher, we sometimes deal with problems that are unique to our profession - students who are giving us problems, administration who don't listen, lack of classroom supplies - and online forums are a good place to hear other possible solutions.
ReplyDeleteHey Ben, I agree with your first thinking point when choosing an online community. As distance is bridged with it comes to communication via the internet, it is important to get instant feedback in order to truly create an interactive dialogue. Unfortunately, I joined an online community, called International Perspectives on Education (IPE), that does not update often. I am a bit wary in receiving feedback but hopeful to find past information relevant to my focus (I'm not exactly sure what the focus will be but the general idea is the American Education system and how it compares to those of other countries).
ReplyDeleteHi Ben,
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for articulating exactly what you were looking for within your online communities. These are excellent points that you make, and imperative to successfully utilizing the community perspective within the development of your MMP.
Based on what you've written here, it's clear to me that you understand that this assignment is not just a busy-work sort of task -- that you can learn quite a bit from other educators in your content area -- in this case, science!
Since it appears as though you've only joined one community, and you are required to join two, please consider looking into other offshoots of the community you've already joined. Even if it's only a blog of one of the posters on that particular site, or perhaps a Twitter group focused on science ed, or ed tech in general, it's good to consider multiple points of view when attempting to conceptualize the growth and development of your MMP.
Nicely done!
prof h