So, umm it’s been a lot longer than I thought it would be between blog posts. Not to say that after our initial Face to Face session on October 19th, I wasn’t completely fired up and gung-ho about being included in Cohort 21. Quite the opposite, in fact!
Nope, I’ve just had my thinking cap on. Big time. So much information to digest from that one day. So many inspiring people. So very humbling.
So, apart from feeling a little overwhelmed in this new (non food-related) digital space that I find myself in, what have I been doing over the past month?
I’ve been keeping myself very busy playing working with Diigo. I’ve been busy reading articles, bookmarking others (and sometimes even getting around to reading those ones) left right and centre. I am really enjoying having one place where I can keep my “academic” (school-related) reading sorted into lists (I actually have some lists started for food-writing related articles too *ahem*) and I’m starting to think about using Diigo to share articles with my colleagues. I find it a nice, one-stop solution to electronic filing. Apart from the Cohort 21 group, I have joined a few others but admit to being a bit overwhelmed at the number of articles being shared there. I’ll get there eventually! It’s just a matter of…
Ah yes, the great enemy – time! After initially being all fired up about “all things Cohort” (Diigo, Twitter etc…), I came to the realisation that, just like my food blog (and all the social media that surrounds it) takes me a lot of hours a week to maintain, maintaining a presence (and doing it well) in my new digital space was going to take some time too. And that would require being even more organised than I like to pride myself on being! But anything worth doing – especially something I am extremely interested in and that I enjoy – is worth making the effort so after I spent a couple of weeks kind of floundering with all the new “stuff” I suddenly had on my plate (and to be honest, kind of ignoring it), I sat down one morning with my daily planner (yes, I am old school for that and have a book that I write in. With a pen.) and each week, I set aside two spare periods where I would work on “Cohort stuff.” That could include reading articles, reading other people’s blogs, sending articles of interest to colleagues, testing new apps on the iPad – you know, the list goes on and on…. And as I sat down in the first “Cohort period” I realised something. This “stuff” is fun. I love it. And actually it felt a little bit like I was playing truant from my “real” job. It sort of didn’t feel like work
This brought me back to Garth’s comment on my last post when I was concerned about “what project” I would be working on for Cohort and he responded:
Your Cohort experience can be as classroom focused as you like. Becoming a “networked educator” and tapping into the global FSL community can be you focus here as well. As you said technology needs to “fit a need” and in a class of beginning language students the fit has to be right. There is no pressure here to make “tech fit”. In fact it is that critical lens that we want to develop as well as plug you into all the other amazing FSL learning happening in CIS Ontario schools and beyond.
And I realised that the time spent having fun working on my Cohort “stuff” is me becoming a networked educator. Which is so important. And, it’s enough.