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"What Do You Have to Lose? was a blog post I wrote 4 years ago… It is a new idea for many classroom teachers/students to move from writing, reading and "doing" work, not only for themselves, supervisors/parents or for a monetary compensation/grade, to share their work openly and freely with others. The idea of putting oneself "out there on the internet" (on a larger scale than the teacher lounge) and publicly "brag" about successes, admit failures, ask for help or document one's learning and teaching process, feels unnatural and even scares many of them. A lot of water has gone under the bridge, a lot has changed in terms of technology… It has been 4 years and my belief in sharing to amplify teaching and learning has grown stronger, even when the work I share gets taken, plagiarized and used for profit by others. I am continuing to make the benefits of documenting (for reflection, metacognition and connection purposes) visible, but the documentation can not be the end all. The next step must be sharing and disseminating that documentation. It is about sharing conversations, resources, model lessons, student work, reflections, innovative ideas, action research, etc. Sharing in service of benefiting the educational community and advancing eduction. Sharing in order to be part of a network that supports each other and and pushes thinking forward. Without individual parts, there is no network. The more parts, the larger and stronger the potential network. In the last few weeks, there have been many examples at Graded, the American School of São Paulo, that show the power of sharing and the ripple effect it created: Teaching others you will never meet Authentic audience Feedback Personal Branding Remix & Added Value Building a Personal Learning Network"

"ou have all been there… Professional Development days at your school… Administration usually choose a topic, design the activities and/or bring in a speaker. Most likely, they will be slides with bullet points…listening…turn to your partners…learning about a new initiative your school will take part in…etc. As more and more educators are building PLNs (Personal Learning Networks) and taking their Professional Development into their own hands, they realize that their in house, school based PD needs to take on new forms as well."

"Looking at the goals, I want to take a closer look at "getting more educators connected". I see Twitter profiles of educators every day who have "jumped on board" by joining "The Twitter". I wonder if these newbies are network literate? Where do they receive the support to grow? Who supports them?"

"Pinterest has the reputation of being the social network platform of women. There are hundreds of boards that fit the typical cliché of teenie girls with movie star crushes, women in their twenties and thirties obsessed with their future wedding dresses, bored housewives decorating their fictitious mansions, shopaholics who pin their dream wardrobes. Probably all true, but just as with any other social network platform, there is another side to Pinterest, if you are willing to give it a try, dig deeper, experiment and are willing to become a pioneer of trying things that no one has tried before."

"Twitter, without a doubt, has become the social network for educators to take their professional development into their own hands. Twitter allows teachers to connect with other educators from around the world, join discussions related to their interests and have a steady stream of resources (to help them teach and learn) available to them whenever, whereever and however."

Langwitches lists some of her favorite DLN connectors

"Twitter can be overwhelming, even for a seasoned Twitterer. We use tools, such as Tweetdeck, to help us organize the tweets coming in --we use #hashtags to filter and connect our conversations --we @mention, we RT, we DM, we #FF --we participate in #edchats --we give credit where credit is due --we take notes --we disseminate interesting information to our network --we amplify our voices to engage in conversation with people from around the world Yes, it can be overwhelming to follow a conference Twitter hashtag such as #AASSA15 (Association of American Schools in South America Annual Educators Conference . (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3). You will find a few sample sreenshots of Tweets from the AASSA conference in Curaçao. Unpacked and annotexted to make the value of Twitter as a Professional Development tool, a learning tool visible to the untrained eye."

"We are in the middle of a enormous change of the culture of teaching and learning. The teacher must see himself/herself as a learner, since he/she is on uncharted territory as well in our ever changing (digital) world. Key competencies and literacies, such as global, media, network, information literacy and digital citizenship amplify our traditional notion and expectation of basic literacy in education. In addition to the traditional content knowledge we are expected to teach/learn in schools, we must include learning how to learn."

"I have had the pleasure of working with the Kauai Pacific School and Martin J. Gottlieb Day School faculty this past month in getting started with classroom blogs. The familiarity of reading and writing in a blog platform varies tremendously. I found it very helpful to start out with a brief overview of the architecture and vocabulary of a blog."

"I believe in sharing. Really I do… I would like to propose a Challenge to Share…for two reasons…"