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Creating and Maintaining a Professional Presence Online: A Roundup and Reflection

If Twitter is not for all educators, what applications or methods are they using to maintain relevance?

TWITTER. It might be the quickest and best method to acquire and maintain the relevance necessary to be an effective educator.

The first automobiles were really horseless carriages, designed on the same frame as a horse-drawn carriage and with power defined in horsepower. The capabilities of these early contraptions were limited, and the infrastructure to support this new form of mobility was slow to develop as the early car owners rattled across the ruts and sank into the mud of unpaved and poorly maintained roads. These days, our society is built around the mobility provided by today's automobiles, and we are seeking to expand the infrastructure to accommodate battery-powered vehicles. How close is this analogy to the early stages of experimenting with cyberspace? I think the two stories are very similar, and I look forward to the day when the ruts in the cyberspace highway have been smoothed for a true community of learners to improve our world.

Members of any profession need to communicate and collaborate with colleagues to understand and improve their skills. Face-to-face collaboration is personal, but is limited by boundaries of time and space. Participants must have a common time and place for collaboration. Digital collaboration has no bounds of time or space, and collaboration can take place anytime with anyone, anywhere.

Technology is not a generational thing, it is a learning thing. It may be outside many educators’ comfort zones, but comfort zones are the biggest obstacles to education reform.

The time has come for educators to accept that they no longer have a choice about technology. To maintain relevance as educators, they need to employ relevant technology learning tools for education, connect and collaborate with other professionals to improve their skills and knowledge within their profession, and use PLNs to improve their profession and hold off the barbarian politicians and business people banging down the gates of education

As leaders, it is important to be connected, to continue growing, and to maintain our own gap between what we know and what we do

By focusing on quality over quantity, families can move away from fear, maintain a healthy balance, and seek out extraordinary learning.

suggest that you always use Google Classroom for students submitting work. This is to maintain a consistency of workflow. Google Classroom allows students to submit any file type.

I instead encourage faculty to start by adding a blog to their class. A blog can be set up in minutes and is easy to learn and maintain. Plus, there are a variety of studies proving that blogging can improve educational outcomes. For instance:

students post their written work to a blog before handing it in. The students received comments from other students and even faculty at other institutions, which improved their work greatly.

First, great teachers tended to set big goals

they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.

NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber.

Experience does not revamp the basic information-processing capacities of the brain. Speed-reading programs have long claimed to do just that, but the verdict was rendered by Woody Allen after he read “War and Peace” in one sitting: “It was about Russia.” Genuine multitasking, too, has been exposed as a myth, not just by laboratory studies but by the familiar sight of an S.U.V. undulating between lanes as the driver cuts deals on his cellphone.

And to encourage intellectual depth, don’t rail at PowerPoint or Google. It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate.

Web 2.0 is transforming our society. Online tools that support collaborative communities are redefining how firms do business, how retailers engage customers, how politicians energize voters, how journalists inform readers, how teachers educate students, how friends maintain relationships, and how individuals shape their own identity.

there are lots of great benefits to having your data backed up online. But there are also lots of benefits to having your data backed up locally, on an external hard drive. It’s cheap, backups and restores are fast and you maintain control over your data.

For teachers on Facebook, professionalism trumps fun

teachers to reflect on how they use Twitter, YouTube and other online channels, all with a mind to maintaining “the public trust.”