Recently, I was participating in an informal Twitter chat with about four dozen educators from all over Michigan. A preservice teacher in the chat sent a tweet out to the educators asking if a school principal would review her ePortfolio. Within minutes, three principals tweeted back that they would … and they did! This is what I call "free ranging" in the teaching profession. More and more new teachers are finding that by creatively networking their professional learning, they create more opportunities for themselves and their students to grow as learners.
- If teachers wanted to brainstorm ideas for a lesson plan, they would walk to the library and look through textbooks or peruse classroom texts.
- When teachers needed to communicate with a parent, a phone call was often the best and only option.
- If the school district called school off for inclement weather, instruction and learning shut down for the day. All communication between home and school ceased.
- When teachers were job searching, they would individually type (on a typewriter!) letters to each school district and attend the local job fair.
- If teachers wanted to collaborate on professional development with other teachers, they would meet up in the teacher's lounge, sign up for a university course, or attend an annual conference held at the state capital.
Over the past decade, however, innovative teachers have gone rogue. Because of digital technologies, teachers are no longer limited to these prescribed behaviors; they are free ranging their professional learning, communication, and collaboration. Here are some of the ways free-range teachers are evolving the profession.
Free-Range Lesson Planning
Free-range teachers no longer walk to the library, nor are they paging through textbooks for lesson ideas. Instead, they log on to websites, such as BetterLesson, Blendspace, GooruLearning, and TeachersPayTeachers, where they search databases of tags and keywords for multimodal lesson plans and resources. Instead of handwriting in lesson plan books, teachers create, organize, and share lesson plans on sites such as Standardsplanner.
Free-Range Classroom Resources
Teachers have no need to purchase or rent VHS or DVD videos; they now go online to Discovery Education, Khan Academy, or Watchknowlearn and locate hundreds of movies to use in their classrooms. Write a letter to a publisher to try to contact a children's author? Oh no, free-range teachers connect with the authors themselves by Skyping with authors! Schoolwork is no longer confined to the classroom—innovative teachers use Google tools to solve problems or to produce and generate knowledge through experiences such as the Google Science Fair.
Free-Range Home-to-School Communication
Although teachers do still pick up phones to call parents, they also use nontraditional methods to communicate between home and school. In the early 2000s, with the emergence of WYSIWYG editors for developing webpages, teachers began developing websites, blogs, and wikis to communicate day-to-day classroom activities and logistics. More recently, free-range teachers have used text alert applications (such as Cel.ly, Remind, Classpager, Joopz) and Facebook and Twitter feeds to communicate with current, former, and incoming parents. These teachers also use applications, such as ClassCharts and Classdojo, to share classroom behavior assessments with parents.
Free-Range Snow Days and School Breaks
Gone are the days when school breaks and snow days were times without any communication between students and teachers. Teachers have discovered ways to check in on their students and their learning beyond the traditional school day. Teachers now use Twitter and Google Classroom to create assignments on snow days, and they conduct activities with past and future students during breaks between school years.
Free-Range Professional Development
Probably one of the biggest rules of the education profession that's been debunked over the past two decades is that all teachers must take university courses, attend district-led professional development, or go to an annual conference to grow as a professional. As free-rangers, teachers now have the option to go directly to social media.
In the early 2000s, innovative educators began blogging about their classroom happenings and sharing ideas around lesson planning, management, projects, and the logistics of teaching. Soon after, teachers found online tools for developing educational podcasts where they could share their work and explore the work of others from across the globe. In the late 2000s, rogue teachers found Twitter, live blogs, and back channels, which allowed them to go off the grid during a conference session and share information with teachers who were not able to attend—thus stretching the discussions and resources shared.
Teachers can also log in to nightly Twitter chats for informal discussions based on a hashtag of their interest. Through Twitter, teachers learn about virtual conferences, unconferences, edcamps, webinars, and MOOCs. Teachers can now freely join a variety of social media channels and grow as a professional and learner. No registration fees required.
Free Range the Job Search
Newly certified teachers no longer just attend job fairs and type letters to school districts. They develop innovative ePortfolios and share them on Twitter with school principals. Preservice teachers use LinkedIn to connect with school administrators. There are job fairs and interviews over Skype. New teachers search online databases of open jobs in new areas of education, such as edtech startup companies that hire teachers to write curriculum and develop training webinars.
This is an exciting and prolific time to be a new teacher. Free-range teachers have redefined the rules of education and opened up new avenues for connecting, creating, collaborating, and growing in the profession.