Comments on: Sharing in Education- Is it Changing?

By: Langwitches Blog » Relationships in School- Collaboration & Collegiality

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 18:56:17 +0000

[...] wrote in a post last year , Sharing in Education- Is it Changing?, about an experience I had with a colleague: I remember being told in my first year of teaching [...]

By: Leslie Healey

Leslie Healey — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 01:45:08 +0000

I am a middle aged woman, but a new teacher, and I am sometimes overwhelmed by the complexity of methods, styles, and goals that I must attend to each day. Thank goodness for the other teachers with whom I beg borrow and steal on a daily basis. I love it! I am using new technology in different ways for my various classes and levels of ability, but I must admit that sometimes I miss the connection between students and teacher that I understood as a student. There are so many choices now–I cannot multitask 24 hours a day-it does not make for good teaching. I am not sure it always makes for good learning either. Sometimes it is not about sharing, it is about moving down deep into layers of reading and writing and thinking–and they can’t all operate like my ADHD students, nor should they. I absolutely love every new bit of technology i add to my repertoire, but sometimes I just need to stop and think and remember what they need, not what I just learned. Sharing is good, but it is not all we should do.

By: Magistra Mahoney

Magistra Mahoney — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 21:12:51 +0000

It is interesting that you discuss sharing today. In a recent blog post (Deliciousness from 11/21/08) I talked about how wonderful it is for me to work in a department that has a strong culture of sharing. We collaborate using common network folders, a shared Delicious account, old-fashioned binders and as much common planning time as we can scrape together (usually on our own time during lunch or after school). In fact, I returned to my current school district after several years away largely because of the relationships with colleagues that I had not been able to find anywhere else. Students benefit when teachers share and collaborate. Teachers benefit when they work together toward a common goal. Technology opens the doors more than ever before to collaboration on a global scale. Teaching (and learning) is too difficult to go it alone.

By: Michelle Bourgeois

Michelle Bourgeois — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 18:42:01 +0000

When I began teaching, it was the “analog” sharing of fellow teachers that got me through my first years. Without their willingness to share ideas, strategies, materials and experience, I couldn’t have made it. That experience made me want to do the same for other teachers as I learned and grew. I never thought of it as “giving away the goods.” To me, the goal was always to learn and improve my own skillset and the best way to do that was always to put my ideas out there for others to use and improve upon.
It’s only been in the last several years that I’ve become a “digital” sharer and I realize the impact it’s had on my own professional growth. In fact, the ability to share digitally has added another dimension to the analog sharing I do at conferences. The ability to begin a conversation in a digital medium and then continue it when we meet at a conference adds a depth to my learning that I wouldn’t have a chance to gain otherwise.
I think there’s a need for both digital experiences to extend learning when budgets and time are limited and a need share learning face to face. It shouldn’t be an either-or, but a both-and because by combining the two, the opportunities for learning grow exponentially.

By: Tracie Weisz

Tracie Weisz — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 18:35:36 +0000

I think that there have always been teachers who wanted to share for the same reasons they want to share now – not only to put something out there, but knowing that putting it out there made it belong to everyone. Once it’s out there and belongs to everyone you want to follow it, see what it links up with, how it evolves and changes, and how it relates to what others are thinking/doing. You put it out there because you want something new to come back. There have always been teachers who wanted that, but before the technology was there it was a crap shoot. You might get something back or have a collaborative opportunity, or you might not. Getting a receptive audience was difficult. Now, your receptive audience only needs to be one person – they are astonishingly easy to find, and through technology they are astonishingly well connected.
There have also always been those insular educators who believe that sharing is a form of “showing off”. For these folks, information only flows in one direction – from administrator to staff, from teacher to student. The “receptive” audience is not important. To those people, an audience is a receptacle, whether it is they themselves as audience members, or their own students.
I have recently been reading that it takes about 2 years on average for a shared space platform to really take off. This is encouraging to me, as I hear of our administrators wanting to take down our moodle site because “no one is using it”. There are a very small core of us who are using it, for the very reasons you have outlined in your post and I feel in my gut that it is important we continue.

Thanks for giving me another aspect of this to think about…