Wikis, Twitters, and Social networking for teachers on the web

Just surfing around & found a few interesting links:

This wiki describes how teachers can use technology for social networking: Socialnetworking4teachers

This wiki is for new teachers new-teacher-resources.wikispaces.com

Here is a link to an article that lists the "top 100 Edu-Twitters"

This site helps schools to network with each other:

www.theschoolsunited.com

It's On: The "21st Century Skills" Debate

Education week just posted a major article on several scholars' challenges to the emerging "21st century skills" movement - a collaboration between professional teacher organizations and businesses that have created a framework for 21st century learning. 

Read it here

According to many scholars, the disagreement actually comes down to the old "skills vs content" debate that has been raging for years. However the 21st century skills folks have been quick to respond to these challenges - here is text from an email they sent to folks on their listserv:

"Education Week has covered a recent discussion between Ken Kay, Diane Ravitch, E.D. Hirsch and Daniel Willingham. The Partnership wants to be clear that we advocate for world class skills and world class knowledge. Our goal is to fully prepare citizens and workers for the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. This means ensuring students receive rich content instruction and graduate with the skills necessary for post-secondary life. It appears our beliefs are echoed by Claus von Zastrow as he said in a blog post: "let's hope our more literal-minded commentators don't make the argument that skills are not transferable-period."

While the above coverage has seemed balanced and informative, some blog posts by discussion participants haven't been. Diane Ravitch, in her blog Bridging Differences, worries that:

"Is [the Partnership] an effort on the part of the technology companies to sell more high-tech hardware and software to schools? Is it an effort to throw a wrench into the effort to develop meaningful and reasonable academic standards by replacing them with vague and pleasing-sounding goals?"

The answer is clearly "no." Our goal is ensure every child in America has the 21st century knowledge and skills to succeed as effective citizens, workers and leaders in today's world."

WOW.

Teachers seeking support & developing their social networks: Two good articles

So, after the SEA conference, Kip Tellez contacted me with to share some information on research he completed a few years ago about how beginning teachers seek out support and help - a fascinating article, with some very similar findings to my research - that teachers often seek informal support persons, rather than formal, administrator types.  Lots of questions are raised by this - like, is it then possible to create formal supportive networks in schools? If so what are the characteristics of "good" formal networks vs. "bad" formal networks (I have some ideas on that one here...) 

Here is the citation to Kip's article:

Tellez, K. (1992) Mentors by choice, not design: Help-seeking by beginning teachers.  Journal of Teacher Education, 43(3) p. 214-221

Also,  Another interesting SNA article on early career teachers that was written recently by Andrew Thomas at UCLA examines the patterns of 99 beginning teachers' social networks and their attrition rates. A major finding here is that teachers with very diverse "heterogenous" networks tended to be "position-changers" - move up in the ranks. Another finding to get you thinking - and connected to some things I've been thinking about - that this coming generation of teacher have more and more ability to reach out to diverse networks - what are the implications of this for teacher attrition rates?

Here is the citation to Thomas' article:

Thomas, A. (2007) Teacher attrition, social capital, and career advancement: An unwelcome message. Research and Practice in Social Sciences, 3 (1) p. 19-47