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A commitment to blogging or tweeting honestly requires you to take a really careful look at how you are spending your time, setting priorities for what you want to achieve for your school, deciding if blogging as a reflective practice will help enhance learning for your teachers, students, and self, and then make a plan to get it done.

I blog because it helps me reflect on my practice. I choose to share the benefits of social media with others because if they can find one effective use of the tools to help their own professional growth and/or that of their schools, then I have helped to make a difference.

If wanting to reflect so I can better my practice, and reading to learn more so I can strengthen my ability to serve students is self-indulgent, then add another scoop of ice cream to that dish. And don’t forget the cherry on top!

It is strange that it’s even a topic of conversation, as you explained. I have learned a great deal since I began tweeting and reading others blogs, and it’s free! The use of social media to grow professionally can revolutionize the craft of education as long as we are fnot ighting amongst ourselves about who should or shouldn’t blog, tweet, or otherwise.

I would definitely share my own thoughts, my own experiences, and my own reflections on how the environment of learning is changin

I would be very transparent in my online learning activity and try to show people in the school that it’s OK, that it has value. I think it’s very hard to be a leader around these types of changes without modeling them.

students should be able to create, navigate, and grow their own personal learning networks in safe, effective, and ethical ways.

And now we’re moving into what they call a “lifelong learning” model—which is to say that learning is much more fluid and much more independent, self-directed, and informal. That concept—that we can learn in profound new ways outside the classroom setting—poses huge challenges to traditional structures of schools, because that’s not what they were built for.

So, I think we need to focus more on developing the learning process—looking at how kids collaborate with others on a problem, how they exercise their critical thinking skills, how they handle failure, and how they create. We have to be willing to put kids—and assess kids—in situations and contexts where they’re really solving problems and we’re looking not so much at the answer but the process by which they try to solve those problems. Because those are the types of skills they’re going to need when they leave us, when they go to college or wherever else. At least I think so. And I don’t think I’m alone in that.

I almost defy you to find me anyone who consciously teaches kids reading and writing in linked environments. Yet we know kids are in those environments and sometimes doing some wonderfully creative things. And we know they’ll need to read and write online. You know what I’m saying? But educators would read Nicholas Carr’s book, and their response would be to ban hypertext. It just doesn’t make sense.

“Why do you blog?” That’s what we need. We need people who are willing to really think critically about what they’re doing. I’m not an advocate of using tools just for the sake of using tools. I think all too often you see teachers using a blog, but nothing really changes in terms of their instruction, because they don’t really understand what a blog is, what possibilities it presents. They know the how-to, but they don’t know the why-to. I’d look for teachers who are constantly asking why. Why are we doing this? What’s the real value of this? How are our kids growing in connection with this? How are our kids learning better? And I definitely would want learners. I would look for learners more than I would look for teachers per se.

And I think we have to move to a more inquiry-based, problem-solving curriculum, because

it’s not about content as much anymore. It’s not about knowing this particular fact as much as it is about what you can do with it. What can you do with what you understand about chemistry? What can you do with what you’ve learned about writing?

What does it look like? Kids need to be working on solving real problems that mean something to them. The goal should be preparing kids to be entrepreneurs, problem-solvers who think critically and who’ve worked with people from around the world. Their assessments should be all about the products they produced, the movements they’ve created, the participatory nature of their education rather than this sort of spit-back-the-right-answer model we currently have. I mean, that just doesn’t make sense anymore.