Session 7A Learning Community Participation

My plan for continued involvment in learning communities is as follows:

1.) Continue to be an active member of my team at work, which is a local learning community, by participating, sharing, and actively stealing all the good ideas that my team mates share at team meetings.

2.) Continue to reach out and communicate with my own informal learning network of educator friends as we share ideas and resources as we come across them.

3.) Continue to read the education blogs that I subscribe to in an effort to be aware of ideas and resources that exist out in the greater world.

Now on to how I really feel about this standard:

The ISTE NETS-T standard says, "participate in local and global learning communities ." Yet the proficient rubric we dealt with for this course said participation meant active contributions including responding to others. Here is how I feel about that.

While I recognize the value of participating in learning communities and the value that comes from learning from people around the globe, I take umbrage at the suggestion that to be an effective teacher who uses technology we should be actively participating in a manner that requires us to contribute. I believe active participation can include regular reading or subscribing to the information generated and posted by the community. Active participation does not necessitate my own contributions to that community. I recognize that a community filled with people who don’t contribute means nothing ever gets discussed, but at the same time a community that has no one reading or watching products placed before it also does not accomplish anything.