Luddite No Longer

It's a Small Small World: Not My Image Part of my job as an English Language Teacher (ELT) is to make language and content more accessible. Honestly it's the most important (read: satisfying) parts of my job. Students arrive at school not knowing English, not understanding American culture, or the American school system. They walk in overwhelmed and confused. It's my responsibility to make them feel welcome, comfortable, understood, and hopefully a little less confused.  Fortunately, since we live in 2017 there are many resources at our fingertips. This week I spent time exploring Twitter and how it can help me bridge the gap between home and school; to make connections. To start my exploration I went to one of my favorite educational websites: Edutopia . (if you aren't familiar, you should be, it's like Wikipedia for teachers!) I searched Edutopia for Twitter and found two great articles:  Making Connections through Twitter  and 100 Twitter Tips for Teachers ...

Oh Twitter, how long has it been? 3 years? 4? It has been awhile since a spent way too much time scrolling through your feeds and overusing hashtags. I'm back now and better then before because now I can waste time on Twitter and call it professional development. (If only I got CTLE credits for it!) Did you know you can use Twitter for PD? You can! This week I explored live chats on Twitter. Look at this crazy mess of Twitter PD!!! While I saw some really interesting and neat ideas, quotes, and resources, I was disappointed with the scheduling of these chats. My schedule this past week was crazy! Monday: Holiday= I am outside not sitting at a computer Tuesday: Meeting after school, home at 9pm Wednesday: Attempt #ELTchat but I was too late, stuck in traffic till 6pm Thursday: Attempt #langchat, it's every other week, not this week. I did briefly follow #games4ed but it was a little over my head Friday: Who wants to PD chat on a Friday night after working all w...

While exploring some Pinterests boards I came across this article:  What kind of teacher are you?  As a fan of infographics I was naturally intrigued. As I read the descriptions of the different teachers I recognized some, identified with others, and thought about the kind of teacher I want to be. Knowing my own strengths and weaknesses is important, but building on them and developing new strengths, and working around or above those weaknesses is also important. This is where PLNs come in. PLNs, or Professional Learning Networks for those of you not stuck in the same Alphabet Soup, are communities where like-interested professionals can share ideas. The Educator's PLN  is an online social media site that connects teachers to other teachers. Now if you are an ESOL/ENL/TESOL* professional like myself then you spend all day with other teachers. So why would you want to spend your down time with more teachers? Because if you ARE like me and my school community then you h...