Professional Development

Today I found the most amazing resource for ECE teachers and directors. It's called Early Childhood Investigations and it provides a link to various webinars for FREE! I already registered for one next month. The upside is that the webinars are offered on Wednesdays. The downside is that they run from 2pm - 3:30pm eastern time which is 9am - 10:30am our time. I encourage all early childhood professionals to take advantage of this opportunity!

EC Investigations

Twitter Reflection

                As I approached this Twitter assignment, I was more open minded about the potential benefits of using Twitter in education after being first exposed to it during the summer. I was hopeful about understanding its value, but I am still struggling to fit into this learning experience. Although tweeting in education is not top on my to-do list in the future, especially in providing course content, I do feel that it helped to create a sense of community among the students enrolled in this class.

                One of the most important things I’ve learned about creating an online environment that is both engaging and collaborative, is in an instructor’s ability to successfully set up their synchronous and/or asynchronous delivery. It directly influences a student’s ability to connect to their peers and feel as though they belong to a greater community of learners. Tweeting has done that for me this semester and I felt connected to my classmates in ways that I did not previously experience. There seem to be a sense of camaraderie and a genuine interest in people. The support I received and observed among others on Twitter was always encouraging. For this reason alone, I can find value in using Twitter in higher education.

                Another aspect of tweeting that I liked, but would have filtered a little more was the sharing of links. There were so many wonderful shares that I couldn’t keep up. I believe that in a smaller class it would have been feasible to ask students to share a link related to a weekly assignment and write a response or review about the tweeted link on a discussion board. It was a real struggle sometimes and I would have to delete words or shorten my thoughts. If another student asked me about tweeting I would say try it out for yourself and definitely have separate Twitter accounts for school, work, and fun (Thanks for that advice Kealii).

Futurism and Change in ECE

I am becoming increasingly frustrated by the minute as I search online for information and resources about "Technology and the ECE Pedagogy." I want to know what the current and new trends in ECE are as it relates to pedagogy? After reading David Thornburg's Technology as an Agent of Change in Teacher Practice, I fell the need to validate that my field of early childhood education is on track with the rest of the technology renaissance in global education. So far, the results have been a little disappointing. Everything that I have read refers to new ways that we can "amplify our current practices" when using computers in the classroom or innovative ways to use a digital camera and is centered on information and communication technology (ICT).

So much of the conversations regarding technology in education circulates around its intergration into the early childhood classroom, and not much about rethinking our pedagogical practices instead of our curriculum content. Yes, I get that there are ways to enhance a learning experience with the use of technology, but I long to move beyond that understanding.