Building Networks: Social Media for Curricular and Professional Development

In this session, participants will build and share professional learning networks based on their disciplines. The goal of this work is to expose more teachers to the power of professional learning networks to deliver curricular and pedagogical development. With a vanguard of teachers building quality networks and sharing how they use their network for curricular and pedagogical development, we can convince others to embrace this style of connected learning. For example, math teachers should head to YouTube and subscribe to Numberphile, Mathologer, and 3Blue1Brown, which will help them build dynamic and practical lessons. History teachers should open their podcast app and subscribe to Backstory, Revolutions, and The Memory Palace in order to enhance their curricular knowledge. And English teachers should get on Twitter and augment their novels with content from Open Culture, Arts & Letters Daily, and Guardian Books.
Adding professional learning into our social media feeds will have exponentially compounding benefits. First, as teachers become comfortable learning in these networks, they will also start to contribute to and collaborate in these networks, which will improve the teaching and learning of all involved in that network. In another positive feedback loop, as teachers engage their media literacy and digital citizenship skills and reap the benefits of this learning, they will pass along that learning to their students, which will bring it into their classrooms and their lives.

Join me for this “Experimental and Social Session” as we bring connected learning in social media networks to teachers across the globe.