Actively participate in professional learning networks to enhance coaching practice and keep current with emerging technology and innovations in pedagogy and the learning sciences.
In a post from March of 2021, Global research collaboration and the Pandemic: How COVID-19 has accelerated networked learning in higher education, I explored the ways in which knowledge sharing and research collaboration increased during the height of the Pandemic. In addition to the public health concerns that motivated scholars and researchers to participate in more information sharing during the pandemic, it can also be said that the act of remote collaboration has become easier in recent years with significant improvements having been made to video conferencing and collaboration software. After all, over the course of one year, Zoom became ubiquitous in work and school settings all over the globe. For my own part, I had the opportunity to work on a manuscript for publication with a team of three other scholars, and we completed our collaborative work entirely remotely using Teams. Teams was used to house and organize resources, create and edit our manuscript, and organize synchronous team meetings to discuss our progress. I was also able to attend and present at two global conferences which were hosted virtually.
Additionally, within the Digital Education Leadership program itself I’ve had the opportunity to work consistently with peers in professional learning networks to complete projects and investigations, search out resources, and gain insight into the ways technology is impacting areas of education (e.g. K-12) I might not otherwise have insight into. Over the course of the last two years I’ve been able to spend time considering the use of emerging technologies and their impact on pedagogy and the learning sciences with input from PLC members. Some of these investigations included:
- Learning Analytics in Higher Education: What’s Working?
- Culturally Responsive Teaching in Digital Learning Environments
- Can a Hybrid Approach to Teaching & Learning Organically Foster Digital Citizenship?
- Exemplars of Computational Thinking in Higher Education Classrooms
- 21st Century Skills in the Higher Education Classroom
And finally, as one more piece of evidence supporting this standard, suggestions for how to engage well in professional learning networks, especially for the purposes of sharing ideas and receiving feedback from peers, are explored in the post Meaningful Feedback in Online Professional Development.
