2013: Expanding the Circle, Closing the Loop
Online communities and learning networks are helping hundreds of thousands of educators learn, reducing isolation and providing “just in time” access to knowledge and opportunities for collaboration. However, many educators are not yet participating and others aren’t realizing the full benefits. In many cases, schools, districts, and states also are not recognizing and rewarding this essential professional learning.
For these reasons, the U.S. Department of Education convened the first Connected Educator Month in August 2012. Highlights of this inaugural event included:
- 170+ education organizations, companies, and communities involved
- 450+ events and activities provided/offered/mounted
- 250,000+ references to the event across the Internet (growing to nearly 500,000 two months after the event)
- 4 million+ followers of the #ce12 hashtag by the end of the month
Seeking to build on this success, the Department of Education has called together a second Connected Educator Month, to be held (by educator request) in October, 2013. This year’s event will have a special emphasis on helping districts promote and integrate online social learning in their formal professional development.
Other goals include:
- Getting more educators “connected” (to each other)
- Deepening and sustaining learning of those already connected
- Stimulating and supporting collaboration and innovation in professional development.
The themes for this year’s event are:
- Making It Count: Integrating Social Learning Into Formal PD
- Connected Leadership
- Personalized Learning
- Innovating STEM and Literacy
- From Connection to Collaboration
- 21st Century Classroom Management
Invitation to Participate
We welcome educators at all levels and those who support them to participate—you’re who this event is for! The first step is sign up, which can be done in seconds. Once you’re signed up, you’ll get regular updates about:
- Highly interactive webinars and other real-time events—many headlined by education, technology, and community leaders—that you can register to attend.
- Forums on key education and community issues in which you can participate.
- Showcases, open houses, launches, exhibits, collaborative projects, polls, and other special activities of which you can partake or be a part.
- Contests you can enter, badges you can earn, plus other resources ranging from starter kits to book clubs and classes to help you join the world of connected education or become more connected.
We also welcome also any organization that supports educators learning online through communities of practice and social networks to develop, host, and run events and activities; to publish content; and to help promote the month. We’ll be providing a “starter kit” to help you plan and provide you with a badge to put on your site. We will also be available to assist you in finding other participating organizations with which to collaborate or that might provide resources you need, and we’ll be actively promoting new partner events and activities every day. We welcome your ideas about additional ways you might participate and about the Month as a whole.