Because Monday was a school holiday here at ISB, I was able to spend most of the day online, which, due to the time difference, meant that I had time to connect with some wonderful colleagues during hours that I would normally be at work:
6:00 am:
As usual, I woke up way too early and raced upstairs to check my e-mail, twitter, comments, etc. This morning I found an e-mail invite from Lucy Gray to join the Global Education Collaborative YackPack group. Once I accepted the invitation and opened up the Pack, I saw that Silvia was online in Florida. We ended up having a great chat about the ups and downs of being an elementary technology facilitator. We firmed up some plans to start a collaborative project after she gets back from her amazing school trip to Egypt.
8:00 am:
Tweeted about my great conversation with Silvia, which prompted Lucy to invite me to join her FlashMeeting with some other members of the Global Education Collaborative. It was my first time in a FlashMeeting session – what a great tool, so easy to use – and I got to “meet” Sharon Peters, Lucy, Westley Field and several other members of GlobalEd. Plus, Lucy gave me the heads up about one of her colleagues in Philadelphia who’s doing great things with tech, so now I can follow her on Twitter too!
10:00 am:
Started checking blogs and commenting – there never is enough time in the day for just reading and communicating… Plus a few tweets here and there with other edubloggers in this region of the world – a real treat since posting to Twitter seems to be blocked at work.
3:00 pm:
After a late breakfast break, and a much-needed nap, I got back online and saw Chrissy online on Skype. We haven’t had a chance to really catch up since I moved to Bangkok in August, so it was great to have some time to chat. Chrissy is taking a course at the WebCast Academy and asked me to do an interview with her for next weekend (local times here).
I wish I had one weekday every week to spend some time online, just connecting with colleagues when they’re available. Imagine how powerful it would be for your classroom to have a global communication center open all day when they can connect with other students around the world during their “work day”…
Time to connect also with those who have great conversations while we are sleeping. Staying up late or getting up earlier just to connect is probably another way in which technology is changing our lives -present and future.
It is always so invigorating and inspiring to catch up with those with whom you can have great conversations! I just love talking with you and am especially looking forward to chatting with you as part of my webcasting internship. Thanks so much for agreeing to it!