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[Guest Blog Post] 7 Lessons About Personalized Learning From Top Tweets

By: Terry Nealon on September 30th, 2015

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[Guest Blog Post] 7 Lessons About Personalized Learning From Top Tweets

Personalized Learning  |  Curriculum Strategy & Adoption

A couple of weeks ago, I tweeted a simple enough question to Fishtree’s thousands of followers:

The first reply came from Kris Giere, an educator in Indianapolis:

This basic first step Kris suggests really resonated with me and made me think of not only the conversations I have with school and district leaders but also my chats with teachers. And that made me think back to my time working with students, how every day I went home with my tail between my legs, humbled by the enormity of the challenge before me.

Despite our best intentions and hard work, the challenge to be the best we can be is enormous. There are two very big hurdles in our way:  

  1. We need to know how to get from where we are in the classroom (reality) to where we want to go (vision)
  2. Whatever we do know about making our vision happen, we often try everything at once rather than breaking it into achievable steps

This is why I asked about the first step for educators interested in achieving the vision of personalized education. Because “you can eat an elephant one bite at a time” (metaphorically, of course) and as requirements, credentialing, and professional development solutions catch up to educator demands, many of us have to learn from each other and our personal learning networks how to make the vision of personalized education a reality in classrooms. And we have to do it in steps or stages.  

So keeping in mind Kris’ advice, I started thinking about what our most popular tweets tell us about what we all want and need in our collective journey to personalizing education. Just as he advises step one is to get to know your students, it seemed wise to use the wisdom of our followers—who by and large are on the forefront of the edtech revolution—to get to know what the leaders who already are personalizing (or are looking to personalize) learning really care about.  

1. Teachers want students to be able to use their voices   

Our most popular tweet in terms of retweets, favorites, and clicks over the past several weeks?

This pro social-media tweet was also popular amongst our followers, who again, are not only educators on twitter but have also self-identified as being interested in topics relating to flipping, blending, and/or tilting their classrooms with edtech in a way that’s adaptive and personalized:

Voice and choice is very near and dear to the educators who follow us, as it gives their students agency and practice with the self-expression fundamental to building a lifelong self-directed learner.  

2. Teachers know the importance of inspiring leadership

I can’t think of a profession that gets more exposure to leadership lessons, day in and day out, than teachers. Even if you’re tired, or battling a personal challenge, or facing any number of situations that would stress out even the best of us, you get up in front of your classroom and put on your game face to inspire and lead the next generation. And teachers do that through changes in school and district leadership, educational policy, and amidst a political climate that in some parts of the country has become increasingly hostile to teachers over the years.

I truly believe that any teacher you talk to can share hard-earned wisdom about inspiration and leadership, so it doesn’t surprise me that popular tweets amongst our followers should be related to what it takes to be a strong leader.

That teachers who are passionate about personalized learning are also interested in leadership means they are modeling the best kind of behavior to their students. These educators not only talk the talk of leadership, they walk the walk.

3. Teachers know each student needs personalized feedback

Different students respond in a different ways to different approaches to feedback, not only in what the feedback is but how the feedback is delivered. One of our most popular tweets recently gave a nod to that traditional feedback delivery mechanism: the red pen.

And just as Kris from Indianapolis suggested for step one to personalizing a learning environment, when a teacher knows her or his students as people, she or he is that much better equipped to deliver feedback in the best way. One thing that’s exciting about edtech is that it can enable teachers to quickly and gently intervene when they notice a student struggling in a particular area. And rather than having to hand out a big red F on a paper or having a student visibly struggle in front of the rest of the class with a problem, teachers can respond privately, discreetly, and quickly when a student needs help, including remediating with additional personalized lessons depending on exactly what they might be struggling with. And they can help with the click of a button, the real-time data are there, the support is done at scale for every single student in any subject.

This kind of private and personalized feedback has simply never been possible to the degree, scale, and ease-of-implementation available from edtech solutions.

4. Teachers are big fans of edtech…

It should be no surprise that our followers or those who find our tweets via our hashtags are edtech enthusiasts, so of course some of our top tweets reflect that interest.

 

5. … and/but they want guidance on best practices…  

Teachers want straightforward guidance on how to get from the reality of their day-to-day as a teacher to their vision. Just because an educator is extremely enthusiastic about edtech and especially personalized learning doesn’t mean they’ve had a chance to absorb best practices, especially since it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff in the edtech space. There is a lot of noise and solutions that just don't work. That there's a hunger for clear guidance on best practices is clear from these tweets that gained a lot of traction.  

 

6… and need a budget to support classroom technology

Obviously educators are aware that just because edtech would increase student engagement and learning doesn’t mean they’ll be able to get the budget from their school or district to implement it. So I wasn’t surprised when this tweet trended as popular amongst our followers.

 

 

7. Teachers are aware of and sensitive to access and edtech

And finally, the teachers who are leading the charge in personalizing education in their classrooms are very aware of and interested in issues around access and edtech. I have to admit, when we first tweeted this out we weren’t sure if it would be of interest to our followers as it’s a bit outside of our traditional purview, but turns out it wasn’t a stretch at all.

So there you have it: seven lessons about personalized learning from some of our most popular tweets of recent weeks. Just as Kris suggested that a teacher looking to personalize their classroom first get to know each of their students beyond their classroom performance, it has been very illuminating to look at what is most important amongst educators interested in personalized learning as evidenced by what is retweeted, favorited, and clicked on twitter.

All the powerful features of Fishtree are available through Highlight Plus.  To learn more about how Highlight Plus can give time back to teachers and better personalize learning for students contact info@edelements.com.

 

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About Terry Nealon

Terry Nealon is CEO and Co-Founder of Fishtree, a global edtech leader with a flagship product that saves higher ed faculty and K-12 educators time and money while increasing quality and access. How? Its award-winning adaptive solution makes creating personalized competency- and standards-aligned courses, lessons and learning environments quick and easy. Nealon is a former Executive Vice President and GM of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and oversaw all activity in international markets. You can follow him on twitter at @nealonter

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