To pursue bright spots is to ask the question “What’s working, and how can we do more of it?” Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. (p. 45, Heath and Heath)
What if we each broadcast three learning bright spots every school day for four weeks? Will we learn more about our community? Will we learn more about each other? Will we create a culture and a habit of positivity, bright spots, and buoyancy?
From an email sent to our community:
Several faculty and staff have asked for additional learning about Twitter. The School Improvement Division of GADOE has approved awarding 1 PLU for completing the course Twitter for Learning: #BrightSpot Ethnography and #Buoyancy. This course will officially launch the week after Labor Day. However, each participant may choose a start date. As an experiment in online learning, this course is set up to run any time from September to January. Many of you will have accomplished the tasks in .Week 0 – Setting Up (the first two hours of this course) if you complete the Getting Started course form and the Know your School’s Social Media Policy form. Contact Jill if you want to meet for a face-to-face session with a small group or individually.
Twitter for Learning is a series of 1-PLU credit courses designed to increase understanding and engagement in the use of social media for learning. Each course is designed around challenges to grow learners in the use of Web 2.0 tools such as Twitter and Storify to learn and share.
Twitter for Learning – Course 1: #BrightSpot Ethnography and #Buoyancy using Twitter
- I can contribute to the bright spot ethnographic data collection of our learning community using Twitter.
- I can use the power of positivity to elevate the learner and learning in and out of school.
- I can bright spot learning in our school and inform the larger community of the myriad of learning experiences that happen daily.
- I can foster and develop connections with other educators and experts to expand my Professional Learning Network (PLN).
Shelley Paul (Director of Learning Design at Woodward Academy), a.k.a @lottascales, and I have collaborated to design a job-embedded professional development course for teacher-learners to learn and grow together. We offer 20 challenges (1 per day) to inspire community members to learn and lift others in our community. Using the power of positivity, we embrace the bright spot philosophy from Switch. We strive tweet things that are working that we want to do more of in our schools with our colleagues using the hashtags #TrinityLearns and #WALearns.
What will we learn about our school, our colleagues, our students, and ourselves if we leverage technology to learn and share?
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Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath. Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. Waterville, Me.: Thorndike, 2011. Print.
Experiments in Learning by Doing 
Wow, I LOVE this idea, Jill and Shelley. Before I share with faculty in the Walker Lower School (or whole school), could we begin a #WalkerLearns hashtag, collaborate with your two schools, and “get in” on this PD with Megan and Liz as the facilitators?
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Absolutely, Megan! We would love for our friends at Walker to join us. Let’s talk soon about how to coordinate facilitation with you and Liz. Let me know how we can help!
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Excellent…will be in tweetouch!
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[…] To pursue "bright spots" is to ask the question “What’s working, and how can we do more of it?” Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. […]
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Jill, love this idea and the so thoughtful way that you are documenting your own learning as you are working with your faculty. We’ve just started tweeting to “lreilearns” and it is helping to capture exciting learning moments and bring more faculty into the twitterverse. Thanks for the inspiration.
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Thanks, Mark, for letting me know about #lreilearns. Good luck! Please let me know how you think it goes. I appreciate your comment and the connection to our work.
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