Connected Educator Month comes to an end

Today was the last official day do Connected Educator Month. I joined one of the last sessions on "Professional Learning and the Learning Profession: 21st Century PD" and found myself with a group of 30 or so other educators, many of whom had names that seemed familiar from other events. One of my big worries in this month long event was that it was mainly populated by people who were already connected.

In this session, we talked about the main things that blocked teachers from getting connected-- time, access, comfort, know how-- the list was easy to generate. But when it came to brainstorming solutions and action items, the group was much less active at the keyboard and the panelists had less to offer.

Here's what I think are some essential actions:

• You cannot mandate connection. I've heard at least two administrators suggest we simply make connecting a mandate and I think that's exactly the wrong way to go about it. Being a connected educator is partly about finding people who are passionate about the same things you are, and you can't mandate passion. In fact, I think requiring teachers to participate will just fill our twitter streams with the junk that anyone being forced to participate in something they don't believe in would create.
• That being said, we should start by helping preservice teachers to create lifelong learning plans. Anyone in teaching knows you learn at least as much in your first year of teaching as you did in your entire preservice program. So we need to make sure preservice teachers know how to use PLNs to continue to grow in their profession-- not require them, just know how they work.
• We need to relentlessly share resources we find with our current peers that are not connected. Last year I worked in a small school with a teaching staff of five teachers. I shared via email useful tweets, articles, blog posts, resources... relentlessly. They were relevant to our work and they included my source when possible. One of the other four teachers has started to get connected and another is on her way.
• We need to open access on teacher's computers. Some of my teaching friends couldn't even access the events from Connected Educators Month because their school computers either blocked the websites being used (the book club Ning, for instance) or they couldn't download the plugins to participate on their school computers. Although I somewhat understand these restrictions on student computers, our teachers should be treated like professionals.

What do you think?