This October marks the third annual Connected Educator Month. “Originally developed by the U.S. Department of Education and its partners as part of the Connected Educators initiative, CEM offers highly distributed, diverse, and engaging activities to educators at all levels.” Information about the program and a full calendar of events can be found on the CEM homepage. There is literally something for every teacher who is looking to continue his/her own professional learning and become a more connected educator. Some examples of events in the coming week alone include:
- Sunday 10/5 at 8 PM EST Workshop: Beginners Guide to Becoming a Connected Educator.
- Monday 10/6 at 4 PM EST Using Educational Technology in the Classroom.
- Tuesday 10/7 at 8 PM EST Weekly Task Talk with Illustrative Mathematics
- Wednesday 10/8 at 8 PM EST New Teacher Chat on Twitter #ntchat
- Thursday 10/9 at 6 PM EST Twitterchat #whatisschool an interactive chat about education around the world
- Friday 10/10 at 8 AM EST New Frontiers in Assessment Discussion
I encourage you to, at the very least, take a look at the calendar of events and commit to participating in at least one event during the month of October. Now on to the Friday 4 Finds of the week…
- Eight Qualities of a Great Teacher Mentor appeared as a Collaboratory piece in the Teacher section of the EdWeek website. Some great reminders and advice to all teachers since we all serve as mentors in one way or another to our colleagues.
- On-the-Spot Scaffolding for Students appeared on the Edutopia website in the teaching strategies section and offers up a few simple to use strategies that can be deployed at the drop of a hat.
- I had several people send me the following piece from the Washington Post: Why a leading professor of new media just banned technology use in class. I must admit that I was intrigued by the title and the topic but found the piece to be less than convincing. Fortunately for me, I subscribe to a blog written by Lisa Nielsen (@InnovativeEdu) that addressed some of my concerns (and then some) in a post entitled Don’t Follow the Lead of @cshirky in Banning Technology.
Enjoy!