I elected to join the ISTE Connect teachers PLN (actually, I joined about eight of them, including the Librarians Network) because the groups aren't tied to a specific proprietary platform. My district is currently using Google Workspace (previously GSuite), but due to privacy considerations around data tenancy its future in our school district is uncertain. I know that I have a lot to contribute and to gain from connecting to the Google Educators PLN, but I wanted to branch out.
I've been a Google-based educator for years. The Google Workspace (then known as Google Apps for Education or GAFE) was put into place at a small independent school on Bowen Island a year or two before I arrived and its potential was largely under utilized. I'm talking pure substitution. We've talked a lot about Ruben Puentedura's SAMR model in this course so far, and there was not a lot of transformative working happening when the school where I worked put GAFE into place. The students didn't have Chromebooks, and they were effectively using Google Docs as a cloud-based MS Word to write up their work in a way that would save automatically.
The head of school at the time (himself a bit of a spreadsheet wizard) decided that he wanted to step up the game and ordered Chromebooks. He tasked me as a new teacher with developing a system for tracking and usage and sent me off to a professional development conference in Vancouver to find out what other educators were doing with the potential inside of Google's educational suite. It was there that my eyes were pried open to see the potential for Google in the classroom. Extensions! Applications! Browser plug-ins! Third-party APIs! Assessment and collaboration and data tracking and revision history. There was so much to learn.
But the biggest takeaway was the potential of all of the teachers from across North America in attendance - each of whom had a Twitter account and a network of educators with whom they communicated, collaborated, and shared. "The world is flat," one of the presenters told me. "There's no reason to not keep in touch about all this stuff."
He was referring, of course, to the ease with which we can all connect, in an instant, to likeminded individuals across the globe all trying to tackle similar problems. Cloud-based resources meant that a successful lesson developed in Dubai was readily available for use in my modest Bowen Island classroom and my students were connected if a classroom in Brazil had questions about life on the west coast of Canada.
While the future of Google Workspace in Greater Victoria is uncertain, I'm confident that the learning I've done through using that platform when it comes to connecting with other educators will be transferrable. The ISTE PLNs that I joined (for now) are as follows:
Arts and Technology Network (I'm a Language Arts teacher at heart, always.)
Computer Science Network (Isn't it all computer science, in a way?)
Digital Citizenship Network (We should be weaving this into everything we do - the world is flat, after all.)
Digital Storytelling Network (See point # 1)
Edtech Coaches Network (Invaluable for the work I'll be doing as a systems-level educator in a TL role, and for all the times my father can't get his printer to work.)
Educational Leaders Network (A connection to my M.Ed work)
Games and Simulations Network (I do believe that games and simulations are going to play a much larger role in the future of our educational environments than anyone realizes.)
Librarians Network (In the hope of connecting to those more experience than me in this vital hub-of-the-school role.)
I'm prepared for the email barrage that comes with this many subscriptions, but I anticipate that I'll likely pare down my memberships to two or three once I have a sense of where I'm best placed. I've had a great variety of teaching assignments and my identity as an educator is in a state of constant flux, but soon I hope to settle down.
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