The+Connected+Educator

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Connected educators understand how to find people who are on our professional wavelength; how to build and efficiently manage a [|personal learning network]; how to gather, analyze and curate what we learn online; and how to then bring it all back to the schoolhouse, where we share what we’ve harvested with our professional learning communities in an effort to increase student learning. It may be projects we’ve found, or what we’ve discovered from reading or connecting with our favorite authors and bloggers, or fresh perspectives we’ve pulled together by crowd-sourcing answers to important questions about teaching practice and student learning. Connected educators use what they learn to make their local context better.======

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Connected educators also know how to extend their professional learning communities into the 21st century world of the Web. They understand that there are very powerful easy-to-use social media tools that make it possible to create online communities of practice that attract global colleagues, guest speakers with all kinds of expertise, and educators who may have solutions to problems we’re facing and can also benefit from the solutions that we have to offer. Such communities, spanning many nations, time zones and cultures, are unprecedented — impossible to imagine back in the professional development environment of the late 20th century. They are places where we can co-create new knowledge that results in high student engagement, deep learning and truly expert teaching.======

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So why is it important to be a connected educator? Because as a connected educator, you’re going to develop all the know-how you need to improve the craft of teaching and to grow as a learner. You’ll also gain the know-how to empower your students to take full ownership of their own educational experience, to build their own personal learning networks and to be able to learn not only in the classroom and schoolhouse, but from experts in myriad settings and from their own peers in far-flung places around the globe.======