I was just sitting down to make out my lesson calendar for the next two weeks. It was a typical Sunday. I was finishing up a discussion with a few #sschat people when suddenly everything blew up. It started when I received a tweet from the President's Press Secretary, a good person to follow if you are a social studies teacher. Within minutes my twitter feed exploded. In the 40-45 minutes it took for the President to speak I had already begun working with the #sschat people to frame the lesson for tomorrow and share resources to make it possible. Tomorrow when i go into class I will not just be teaching a lesson that I threw together overnight and on the drive in to work. I will be sharing a lesson that I crafted while conssidering the opinions of literally hundreds of co-workers and teachers. I will be using resources and links that were shared and evaluated by professionals that I respect. I am so eager to get into the classroom that I doubt very seriously if this insomniac will be able to sleep at all.
This is the power of the effort that I have been putting in to Twitter and #sschat lately. I do it because it yields such great results and because it has so drastically improved the power of my lessons and the efficiency of my process.
Tomorrow night #sschat will debrief what we did in class today and discuss ways to teach these historical events. The thought that is really spinning in my head even more than what I can accomplish tomorrow, is how much better I am going to be in the future when such a huge news story breaks.
I need to get to sleep now, I hope. This is why I am proud to be a teacher.
P.S. I am absolutely sure that no one I worked with for the last three hours got any overtime pay. This is what teachers do to serve their students.
I cannot wait to hear how your Monday lessons go with your students. I am still waiting for my online History students to begin chiming in to the Discussion Board forum I created in my course and to get their reactions to the videos I posted of GW Bush immediately following 9.11 and tonight's speech by Obama following the death of Bin Laden. I have just recently begun to "do" the Twitter thing as a PLN, and find myself glued to Twitter way too many hours each day. I am giddy over all of the new info I have gained and the fabulous educators I have connected with thanks to Twitter, #sschat and #edchat.
ReplyDeleteHave a blessing filled week.
@chanselor (Shannon)