Informal Blog Post: Take One

I woke up this morning really excited to dive into my goal of interacting on social media and building my PLN. In particular, I wanted to follow some blogs that have been introduced to us in class, and take some time wandering around Twitter to find people that will inspire me professionally.  This is my first informal post, one that I will not submit for grading. I am consciously refusing to edit and re-edit, and just want to journal my experience navigating this new realm. Will it be as interesting and rich as promised?

I started by re-reading Christine Younghusband’s blog post titled Evolution of My PLN and love the idea of making new friends on Twitter.  I am part of a facebook group of fitness enthusiasts that has over 50 members from across North America, and I have had the pleasure of meeting a few of those individuals after first establishing a friendship on facebook. I wonder if participating in Twitter and reading blogs can offer me the same inspiration and sense of community.

I then looked up Christine Younghusband’s blog. Within 5 minutes I was reading about a course Christine taught in the Summer of 2018 called “Quantitative Approaches to Environmental Education”.  Crazy. Taking my masters was a decision I made to inform and support the implementation of Environmental Science 11 in our School. I thoroughly enjoy math, and look forward to using quantitative analysis with my students to evaluate our marine and land environments. Now I am repeating a sentence from Christine’s blog in my head: “It was very serendipitous”. Yes it is. Listed in the required reading for Christine’s class is a book by Judson, Gillian (2018) titled “A walking curriculum: Evoking wonder and developing sense of place (K-12)”, which appears to fit in beautifully with the ideas I have for my class next spring so I promptly ordered it through Amazon.  I watched Gillian Judson’s Tedx Talk  titled “Engage Emotion, Engage Imagination” and followed her on twitter.

She has 18.1K followers and is following 14.2K twitter accounts. I’ll checked them out later:) I also made note of the fact that she offers workshops to school districts…perhaps a ProD opportunity I can suggest. Thirty minutes in and this has already been so fruitful. I could stop now, but I haven’t even read a blog or dove into twitter! This will likely be time consuming, but I am already assured it will be worth it.

I commented on a blog post from Christine, noting our similar areas of interest and thanking her for directing me to some valuable resources. This is easier than I thought! One hour in and I am switching gears to check out Ian Landy, AKA Technolandy.  Second blog in and I am reading his post regarding his chat with #TIEgrad. He recommends some hashtags, handles, and blogs, and I have followed Katie White @katiewhite426 (I really appreciated her positive, inspirational tweets) and Dean Shareski @shareski. Wondering what to do next I looked up a friend and respected colleague (also a twitter enthusiast) and checked out who she follows. I added Ted-Ed, Elisa Carlson, Ally Hoffman (who I did my practicum with way back when), Daniel Pink (I have read and thoroughly enjoyed his books!), Chris Hadfield (he has such an endearing personality), TomWhitby, Alan Clark (colleague at Spectrum), Ramy Gerber (VP of our neighboring elementary school where I have helped create a shared garden space), UVIC, Bruce Bidney (my principal) and Greater Victoria SD. I’m losing steam, so I’m going to close by updating my twitter profile as this influenced who I followed greatly.

Not bad for my first day.