So EduCon ended Sunday. Today is Wednesday. I am still not home. I am not vacationing, I am stuck. My flight Monday was cancelled. The earliest flight home is tomorrow morning. So I sit in my hotel room with my thoughts and entertainment from my friends.

One conversation from EduCon I have been reflecting on was Alec Couros and Dean Shareski lead about sharing. This is something that I have been dealing with internally and externally lately. One thing has been convincing parents to trust the teachers and allow their children to share online and they other is trying to figure out how to get students to share beyond casual conversation.

One thing that came up when talking with others at my table was how resistant kids can be about sharing ideas, thoughts, work, etc online. It is so natural for children to want to share things. To want to tell a story, yet the minute the medium for doing changes, it’s like they freeze or do the bare minimum.

We have to be patient when teaching them to share in ways they are not used to. Sharing has a huge impact on their learning and on learning of others. They need to know what they should share and what they shouldn’t. It takes them years to learn how to share in their elementary journals in notebooks, so it will take longer for them to learn do it in a public forum.

When I joined twitter over 2 years ago, it and facebook would not have been the first place I would have turned when finding out my flight was cancelled Monday. But it was. I did it again and again as flights were cancelled throughout the week. It took months of learning how to use the medium and months before relationships were formed. Thank goodness I did share, it helped me find a decent hotel (with free food), my friends kept me company through this lonely times, and even offered ways to help get me home or entertain me.

We know as educators the benefits of sharing globally, our students and sometimes their parents do not. We must teach this, we must encourage this, we must foster a desire for this. Most importantly we must be patient and let this skill develop. I need to remind myself of this as I read their first blog post this week.

If you have ideas that have worked, please share 🙂

A