Twitter for the WIN: Snow Day Collaboration

Each year about this time, I am working on a project around promoting & supporting Digital Learning Day.  Sometimes I struggle with this because I am steeped in working with schools who have excellent digital learning.  They are 1:1,  they know tech is a tool, not the end all be all.  They lobby often for more bandwidth, unblocking, and employ technology purposefully to extend learning and to connect with others.

Because this is my "normal" for digital learning, I was reflecting on what part of digital learning was most important or urgent for me.  Just as a was coming to a conclusion around the fact that the best part for me was connecting…I was distracted from my very deep thoughts around this by this Twitter stream…

Then I was totally sucked in!  The tweets flew back and forth with project ideas from these teachers.  The significance for me was, it began with a teacher listening to a podcast, snowed in on his farm, reaching out to his colleagues via Twitter.

You could feel the sense of urgency to get busy on in leaping from the page.  The more they went back and forth, the more the ideas grew, one of the final tweets was this…

 Later that night I see this Facebook post from one of the snowed in teachers….

Connectivity is the win for me.  Teachers connecting with each other as needed not from 8-3, connecting with broadcasters, journalists all to connect students to resources, history and possibilities.

I know these teachers, I know they had this passion for teaching and learning long before we had real-time collaboration via Twitter, but without Rex, sending out that tweet and his colleagues jumping in and responding, the idea might never have been fed, nurtured and now growing into a project.