Educator of the 21st Century

Here is just a glance into the ‘Educator of the 21st Century’: (no educators were hurt in the writing of this blog post)

Of course every day/week is different but here are just some examples of what it looks like:

At a meeting discussing what might be a good software application for students to practice their keyboarding skills… educator says, ‘Let’s see what my PLN says’ and immediately sends a tweet out that reads: ‘Hey PLN: what keyboarding program do you use with students?’. In less then 10 minutes six tweets have been sent back with links to four different resources that the committee can check out. They create a wiki to begin their exploration so that all members can comment on the programs before they choose one for the district. (If interested you can check out the ‘Keyboarding Programs compared wiki page‘ here.
A group of teachers are creating a benchmark assessment for their 3rd grade students and need to create a graph, the facilitator remembers a website ‘Create a graph‘ where you can, of course create a graph! She goes to her diigo library and finds the website that she shares.
Educator needs to get a group of teachers together to discuss student achievement, she puts out a doodle to find out when everyone is available and schedules the meeting.
While unit planning a teacher starts the planning like always, with content/skills, then figures out the big ideas (enduring understandings) and essential questions. After determining what they want the students to take away from the unit, they create an authentic performance task that involves using a tool like glogsterEDU, voicethread, pbworks wiki, edublog, photostory 3,or audacity to create a digital presentation, digital poster, digital conversation, collaborative wiki, blog, or podcast. When the students are done they also publish their creation for a global audience.
Scheduling is done with a digital calendar that can be shared so that the principal’s available schedule is always available.
Resources by building and/or district are organized by tags in a social bookmarking application like diigo. (There are a lot of bookmarking applications out there, for education I don’t think you can beat diigo.) This way all educators can have access to everyone’s amazing resources at a click of the mouse. It also makes it easy for committees to share links.
When an educator creates a document at home, no more need for a flashdrive, or to attach the documents to an email and worry about the size of document. Documents are saved to an online storage locker that can be accessed at school. (There are a lot of these, I like to use box.net)