Lisa's Blog

Chapter 4 of the Connected Educator discusses building our online communities and discovering better connections. This is hugely important to being successful in your career. This chapter has two main focuses, congeniality and collegiality. Although these as very similar sounding words they have very important, individual meanings. Congeniality is defined as polite, warm relationships developed with one another. These friendships can be as simple as friendly conversations, or can be more meaningful like going to events together. These types of relationships are important for life in general, and generate happiness. Collegiality then, is specifically in the work environment where you are friendly with your coworkers and you get along with your bosses. This allows for a thriving workplace because everyone can work as one unit. The main focus of collegiality is that everyone is on the same playing field, and a smooth operation relies on everyone working as a team. Personally, I use both

Kidblog is a platform that was founded in 2007 to connect students, teachers, and parents to the classroom for an all-inclusive education. The website is geared to elementary and middle school kids specifically. This website allows for students to publish their writing, audio, visual, or video projects. It also allows teachers to create a class blog as a way to communicate with parents. Teachers are able to include parents in important information regarding their children. This can include things like information about daily happenings in the classroom, upcoming deadlines, and learning tips for students. Teachers also have the ability to use Kidblog as a digital portfolio, which could grow with students from year to year within the same school district. Kidblog has many different imortant features like privacy adjustments, allowing anyone from the students and parents to view content, up to the general public. It is also very easy to create a blog by allowing the teacher to implement

Chapter 5 of the book, "The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age", continues on the topic of connected learning, but goes much more in depth on internet tools that can be used to support this. These tools cover a wide range, including some of the most well-known platforms like Blogger, WordPress, Twitter, Tumblr, and Google Docs. These tools can aid the development of connected learning communities. Also, doing so is fairly easy because "you do not need to be a web expert to take advantage of these tools—many of them are used widely because they are easy to use" (Hall & Nussbaum-Beach). It helps, as well, that technology is such a big and important part of our lives already, through social media, so many already have a basic understanding of using technology in their personal lives.  Having access to, and understanding of these tools can make a big impact in the quality of your connected learning. For example, the chapter talks about d