21st Century Educator

Today's #edchat on Twitter was about how we can break free of the echo chamber that is #edchat.  We all have great ideas, but how can we turn those great ideas into action?  Our objective is not to stop our great conversations but to also move beyond our conversations into concrete action.

Here's a great blog post with a summary of the different ideas from the night, as well as the perspective of the author, Matt Guthrie.  I don't want to repeat what he says, but his post is totally worth reading.  The summary of the entire chat is here.

There was some action taken tonight, which I hope sees enough follow through to be useful. For example, one member of #edchat started a wiki where we can gather together our successes and failures in the area of educational reform.

I started a document to help organize a standard argument we can use to bring down the Internet filters at our schools.  The objective with this document is to share our individual arguments for why Internet filters are ineffective.

Another suggestion from @TeacherReality is to create local teacher "think tanks" which are linked to our national or international teacher organizations.

What other concrete steps toward educational reform have you see that were a result of one of our conversations on #edchat?

• David Wees's blog

About David

David is a mathematics teacher and a learning specialist for technology at Stratford Hall in Vancouver, BC. He has been teaching since 2002, and has worked in Brooklyn, London, and Bangkok before moving back to Canada. He has his Masters degree in Educational Technology from UBC, and is the co-author of a mathematics textbook. He has been published in ISTE's Leading and Learning, Educational Technology Solutions, The Software Developers Journal, The Bangkok Post and Edutopia. He blogs with the Cooperative Catalyst, and is the Assessment group facilitator for Edutopia. He has also helped organize the first Edcamp in Canada, and TEDxKIDS@BC.