I always seem to feel “behind the times” and trying to “catch up” – if that is at all possible. HA HA!
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity, along with some other administrators in my district who are also Digital Coaches, to have lunch with Bill Ferriter (@plugusin on Twitter). Bill was presenting that afternoon and then at our Engaging the Digital Learner Dinner Series the following night. But, as a Digital Coach in the district, we get these wonderful opportunities to have lunch with our speakers beforehand. It’s always a great time to get to know the speaker on another level.
During our lunchtime discussion, Bill gave us some advice about engaging staff members and parents in online communities like Twitter and blogs.
One of his suggestions was to make a Bundle of blogs in an RSS feed for people to read. If we gather the bundles together for them, and share the blogs in this easy format, then we would be one step closer to engaging people with some of the wonderful educators online. He also suggested doing this with Twitter hashtags as well – put together a list of Twitter hashtags arranged by topic in a customized RSS feed and then give those to teachers (i.e. science, literacy, numeracy, parental involvement, etc…).
Instead of putting together a bundle of blogs of unknown people for others to read, I thought I would attempt my first bundle, by putting together a bundle of blogs written by administrators in our district. Many of these administrators have just started writing their blogs as part of our Digital Sandbox series.
So, here’s the bundle of SD36 (Surrey) Administrator blogs thus far. Bill also suggested to use bitly.com to make a customized shortened link that would be easy to remember. The bit.ly link for our SD36 admin bundle of blogs is: bit.ly/sd36admin. I figure that would be pretty easy to remember.
Another take-away from lunch with Bill was when Bill talked about advice he received from Patrick Larkin about encouraging innovation and influencing others,
“Find one person and change one person – and then hope they will go change others.”
This is powerful advice that puts things into perspective. We must work together as a team and use the team to influence others. This is something we are doing at the district level with Digital Coaches for administrators. We can not influence everyone all at once, but must start small and once the fire ignites, it will continue to build – it just takes time.
For some of us Plungers, we are not used to things “taking time”, but to go far, we must remember the importance of going slow.
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