Online Community

Although I thought that finding an online community to join would be one of the most difficult tasks, it ended up being rather easy for me. Sure, I looked and looked for awhile as well as took other students' online communities into account. There are all sorts of weird things on the internet now such as wikis and such. It's all very confusing to me. However, as I looked, I happened to come upon Edutopia. I looked at a bunch of the community's information and explored it a bit deciding that it was something that I could do. I could be a part of that community, and thus I joined.

Over the two weeks I've been a part of the community I found a lot of valuable information and interesting conversations. To me, this site mainly gets its value from these conversations. I wasn't attracted to the blogs of any of the articles that can be read from its main page. Of course, that can all add to the potential value that the site has for me. Honestly, all that stuff is simply too much. There really is too much information out there, too many opinions, in my opinion. And there's yet another. It's all a bit overwhelming.

Anyways, the conversations take place within a number of interesting categories such as "project-based learning", "technology tools", and "classroom management" just to mention a few. It appears that within each category, there are a few moderators who are highly involved in asking questions, writing blogs, etc. It seems that most of these people are some form of administrators. The rest of the community consists of teachers scattered throughout the world.

One of the conversations I immediately replied to was a "technology tool" called mathdisk. You can read one of my conversations here http://www.edutopia.org/groups/technology-tools/173624. A creator (or advertiser or sorts) of a mathematics tool on the web posted a comment that this particular site existed. Interested, I checked the site out and gave a quick simple review. I pointed out that the tool was really cool, but there wasn't very many ready made worksheets for educators to use. The site's creator valued the comment and informed me that there was much work going on but not being published to the site. The moderator gave a comment as well to which I replied based on his bad connotation of the term "worksheet". He still hasn't answered but I'm interested to find out.

I also went joined a conversation about wisdom that we had gleaned in terms of classroom management. I read a few comments (out of well over 100!) and posted mine. A teacher who had been in Chevak for 25+ years told me, "You have to get the students' respect." And I truly believe that is a very important quality in the classroom. But I find, given my style of teaching, I can't demand it but welcome it by modelling my own respect for each and every student in the classroom. I truly try to value each student's immense value to my life and to my classroom, that value is my respect for them as people. However, that doesn't mean that I respect it when they make bad choices. You can find my comment here http://www.edutopia.org/groups/classroom-management/8278?page=10, which I believe is Comment #101. Additionally, someone replied with a tool that I can check out to meet my goal. Very cool!

I like the format of a conversation, an opportunity to exchange valuable ideas to become better educators. This is in essence what it means to be colleagues. Although I don't think I'd participate on the site but occasionally, it still will be a valuable addition to my teaching repertoire. It gives me yet another place I can go to learn more about my profession and share with others what I have learned.