My last post was a bit of a revelation to me. When I posted the question of “What is a Principal“, I was only sure of one thing, that it would put me one step further on my journey as the emerging principal. What happened was unanticipated, someone read it and commented on it. I certainly know that getting people to read my blog and add their thoughts to it is a big reason why I do it, but I just had no expectations when that would occur. Now that I have started to see the exchange piece of my blog come into play I feel that I can now see the true value of these tools, communication. Suddenly I had feedback from principals in Wisconsin and Virginia. Without this site, I would have never extended my reach beyond New Hampshire and Vermont and now after less than a month I am starting to get what I am looking for out of this site. I wish I could sit here and tell people that my comments were the result of people just googling my site, but that is not the case. The missing piece has been my discovery of Twitter and the starting of my personal learning network. As a technology director, I have been aware of this tool for some time but I could never see why I would want to answer the question “what am I doing” over and over again. Thanks to Scott Elias’ and Melinda Miller’s Practical Principals podcast I decided to give Twitter a try. I took me a bit of time to get the idea, but now I starting to see a Personal Learning Network emerge. The comments on my blog were indicative of the presence of this network and were the direct result of my use of Twitter. So on the Sunday of the 500, on your mark, get set, communicate! A couple questions to leave you with:
1. Are you using Twitter as a school communication tool? If yes, how? Anyone out there using it in a rural environment?
2. Any schools out there using a blog as a core piece of your website. If yes, please post a link so we can see some examples of uses beyond the random musings of an emerging principal.
3. Communication starts through the development of a personal learning network. Mine starts with Twitter, so please post a link to your Twitter profile so I can continue expanding mine.
