Oh what a week- E-Portfolios, DigCit and more

As I sit here getting ready for the week ahead, I cannot help but continue to think and reflect on last week. It was a stressful and exciting week of being part of an amazing team that organized a day full of sessions on topics from proficiencies, youth suicide prevention, digital portfolios, and many self-care sessions for the teachers, guidance counselors, and nurses in the district. I was lucky enough to be able to lead two sessions.  One session was on making a digital citizen and creating connected classrooms. The topic of my session ended up connecting with the Technology and Leadership course very closely. Now, as the week comes to a close, I wish the additional information I have now, I would have had last Sunday.

I am excited to start this week planning and organizing. One thing I have learned in this new role is I need to schedule time. I need to schedule time for projects I need to focus on otherwise my schedule quickly fills up taking care of so many other things. Although all of the other topics and tasks are important, I now feel that I need to devote some of my time to helping to make a plan for what I need to do for the supervisory union to support teachers in the process of implementing digital citizenship in all areas of a student's day.  The group of individuals I worked with on Friday have sparked creativity in me. I want to start to plan out future sessions, school visits, and leadership presentations. Thanks to the Twitter lists and contacts, the tons of great resources shared by so many I have connected with just this week or in the last month, I feel I am starting to have the knowledge I need to pull all of this together. I am feeling the need to continue to share the positive side of making digital citizens. I plant to create a Wakelet collection to curate resources that I can share with teachers and administrators.

My first thought is to start with helping the teachers become strong digital citizens. After chatting with a number of teachers on Friday and mentioning to them about using the hashtag one of our principals was going to use, #ncsulearns, we were surprised at how many of them had no idea how to use the hashtag.  So many of them are fearful of social media themselves.  If we want them to support students, they need to feel comfortable with the tools and techniques themselves. My first goal, as of right now, is to start to work with the teachers that need help to make stronger connections with other educators on social media.  This is a bit of a scatter post of my thoughts of the end of the week.  However, being able to say I have a goal of what I want to try to do first, helps me feel like I have closed out the week. On to the next week....