ISTE Standard 5 focuses
on teachers using digital tools to constantly improve their teaching. This includes
participating in professional collaboration with other teachers (Standards).
The article I found
regarding this standard is “Tech as a Tool for Teacher Collaboration” by
Elizabeth Petersen (2010). In the article, Petersen details her use of Twitter
and other social media sites to create what she called a personal learning network
(PLN), which allows for her to collaborate with teachers from all around the
world (2010). The video “Twitter for Teachers” explains the process of building
up a PLN, beginning first by finding one respected person in the field of
education and then searching out the people they follow, in order to find
educators with similar interests (Hill 2010).
Social media and PLN’s
have several convenient advantages for teachers’ professional collaboration. Twitter
has the advantage of having a long stream of useful ideas from teachers all
around the world, and the added advantage of being able to dismiss or ignore
ideas that are not interesting with little effort (Hill 2010). Petersen added
that another benefit she gained from online collaboration was the ability to
put together presentations with teachers and educators she met through the PLN
(2010). Through social media, ideas may be effectively shared between teachers,
who may then produce collaborative projects of their own.
These features of
technological collaboration apparently meet ISTE Standard 5 very well, since
the tools take full advantage of technology in meeting teachers through the
internet and can effectively produce results, such as Petersen’s presentation,
which seem to me to be an indication of successful collaboration. It is possible
that some version of Twitter or other social media sites specifically designed
just for teachers and educational purposes may have additional benefits that
the originals not have, but even without additional benefits, social media as
it exists apparently has the opportunity to meet ISTE 5 and offer teaches the
chance to find ideas that will improve their practice.
Sources:
Hill,
P. (Producer). (2010, August 27). Twitter
for Teachers. Video retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tT6N_8wcn4
Petersen,
E. (2010, November 6). Tech as a Tool for Teacher Collaboration. The Inspired Classroom. Retrieved from http://theinspiredclassroom.com/2010/11/tech-as-a-tool-for-teacher-collaboration/
Standards
for Teachers. ISTE. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/standards/standards/standards-for-teachers
While engaging in one of the Twitter learning communities for the standard 5 project, I was amazed, but also felt overburdened, with the massive amount of information presented and available from so many people across the country. As Hill (2010) points out though, the massive amounts of information that may overload a user can certainly be filtered, dismissed, and ignored.
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