ONE OF THE MOST VIBRANT uses of online social networking happens from 8:30PM to 9:30PM most Monday evenings in Ireland. It's a well-organised online meet-up of educators on Twitter. They use the hashtag #edchatie to foster a lively conversation about a pre-selected topic. Tonight's was about CPD. At the end of the hour, I scraped all the tweets that used the #edchatie hashtag and generated a 31-page Word Document. Then I copied and pasted that document into Wordle to produce the word cloud at left. Wordle is a little thick so I cannot parse the results to eliminate the names of contributors but seeing them appear in Wordle gives viewers an idea about who was the most talkative during the hour-long session. I'm taking away some important thoughts related to CPD in the Irish education system nonetheless.
I would like to see a way to establish an accredited CPD programme for Irish educators that ensured an informal and engaging set of meet-ups could be conducted in a blended delivery format. In such a programme, demonstrators would show a piece of technology or a lesson plan or a practical session and elicit two questions from teachers.
1. How did you do that?
2. Can I have a go at that?
If we did it right, we would enhance CPD in a very positive way.
Hat tip to Fred Boss for running the #edchatie series.
