Connecting and Collaborating All Year Round: Reflections on Connected Educator Month 2013
October 2013 celebrated educators from around the world who got online to connect, communicate, and collaborate with their fellow teachers and instructors during Connected Educator Month.
The Open Badges team was approached back in september by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) who, in collaboration with the Department of Education, had initiated the inaugural Connected Educator Month in 2012. Last year’s program was a big success, with over 170 education organizations and communities getting involved and over 4 million followers of the #ce12 hashtag by the end of the month.
This year, they asked us to create badges for the month’s programs to capture the learning and development of skills achieved by connected educators through the month of October. As our Product Lead Sunny wrote in her blog, “we had the wonderful opportunity to work with the folks at AIR and the Dept of Ed to make badges on CEM a reality.”
We repurposed many of the tools we’d built for the Chicago Summer of Learning (CSOL), bringing together Open Badger, the badge issuing tool, and Aestimia, the badge assessment tool, in particular.
Although the badge system for CEM 2013 was smaller in scale than CSOL, the audience reach was much larger, and was both international and distributed. To get a better idea of how CEM 2013 went, let’s take a look at some initial numbers from eSchool News’ managing editor, Laura Devaney:
More than 330 organizations participated in CEM 2013!
More than 600 events and activities were included on the CEM calendar
Outreach efforts on Twitter alone reached more than 13 million educators, generating an average of 4.6 million impressions per day. Check out these 50 Hashtags For Connected Educators!
Online, Connected Educator Month was mentioned more than 750,000 times
More than 270,000 blog posts mentioned CEM 2013 - including ours!
(Participation numbers reflect the most recent data available at press time, but Connected Educators representatives said final numbers are pending and are likely to be higher when everything is analyzed.)
“These numbers shatter records generated by the very successful 2012 event,” said Patrick Riccards from the Collaborative Communications Group, which promoted CEM events on behalf of Connected Educators.
The Open Badges team created 4 different categories of badges for Connected Educator Month: Peer to Peer, Starter Kit, Connected Educator and Participation:
Peer to Peer badges were (and are continuing to be) issued from a peer to another peer. A connected educator submits their email as the nominator and the email of a fellow peer they want to nominate for the badge and include information on why they believe that peer deserves to earn that particular badge. This information then goes to an assessor who evaluates the reasoning provided by the nominator and then approves the badge to be awarded to the nominee.
Starter Kit and Connected Educator badges on a functional level were very similar in that the connected educator applied for either one of those badges and submit evidence, which was sent to an assessor who evaluated the evidence against criteria and was either accepted (or rejected) with the awarding of a badge.
Event badges accounted for participation in the hundreds of events on the CEM calendar that include webinars, conversations, discussions etc. When events were added, CEM staff would generate a unique multi-use claim code for the event and give that to the event organizer to disseminate at their event. Event participants could then go to the CEM site and input the claim code, and get recognized for participation in the event.
I just earned a digital badge as part of Connected Educator Month! Earn your own at #ce13: http://t.co/GNg2HCLSUV via @edcocp
— ghholmes (@ghholmes)
November 8, 2013
As official events and activities wound down for Connected Educator Month, and Digital Citizenship Month activities kick off for the month of November, more and more educators were writing enthusiastically on their blogs and Twitter feeds, making a commitment to year-round connected education.
To honor Connected Educator Month and support President Obama’s ConnectED Initiative, the White House will host a ‘Champions of Change’ event on November 21 to celebrate leaders in education who creatively use technology to enhance learning.
Some educators in our blogosphere who have been using technology in creative new ways to stay connected and further their own and their students’ learning include:
Smadar Goldstein: “After seeing the benefits of utilizing learning management systems and online tools, I loathe to think of a learning environment without these technologies available.”
Caitlin Tucker: “Whether on a small scale with people in your own town or on a global stage, connecting with other educators can allow you to design activities and projects that make learning relevant.”
Patrick Larkin: “The bottom line is that our students need to know how to create Personal Learning Networks (PLN's) that will allow them to connect with others who share their passion in a particular area. For this to happen to the fullest extent possible, we need out students to be surrounded by educators who can model the practices of a connected learner.”
Larkin, Burlington Public Schools Assistant Superintendent for Learning, even featured a connected educator on his blog for each day of CEM 2013! Read through some of them and you’ll get an idea of how excited educators are to learn new skills, pass them on to students, and improve the learning experience of all involved through creative use of technology.
According to Edublogger’s Sue Waters, “most educators who learn to use Twitter effectively say they learn more from their personal learning network (PLN) on Twitter than they’ve achieved from any other forms of professional development or personal learning.”
EduBlogger is a great resource for those just getting started - there are quick beginner guides for educators wanting to learn more about the value of Twitter, Facebook, blogging and even creative commons licensing!
Despite having only a short window of time in which to put together the Connected Educator Month badges, our Product Lead, Sunny, felt it was a “rewarding experience” that was worth the late nights and last-minute tweaks:
“It was great to see the CSOL tools we built be extended to service other organizational needs and it was exciting to know that we were able to do so rapidly.”
We are further breaking down and building up the tools used for CSOL and CEM to create BadgeKit, a more accessible set of modularized tools that will be launching soon.
“A lot of work remains to get the tools fully modularized to make extensibility more facile but undergoing this project with AIR and the Dept of Ed in a very short period of time was an indicator that we are not too far off,” said Sunny. “We’re excited to make these tools readily available for those interested in developing a badge issuing and assessing component to their site and we’re hard at work to make this happen.”
Darren Cambridge, Principal Consultant for the Networked Learning Group at AIR, echoed Sunny’s feelings that the month was a successful and heartening experience:
"The Mozilla Foundation made a major contribution to the success of Connected Educator Month through partnering with the American Institutes for Research to implement a usable and compelling open badging system in an amazingly short amount of time. Thanks to their work, educators around the country and across the globe were able to document their learning across October's more than 600 connected professional learning events.”
As well as learning new skills and participating on networking platforms possibly for the first time, many of this year’s connected educators also had their first badging experience.
Educators were able to earn and award badges as they “developed new skills for building personal learning networks, and recognized the contributions of their peers to their professional successes,” said Darren Cambridge. “For many educators, this was their first taste of digital badges, and the experience left them hungry for more."
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For more information and to see a calendar of events that are continuing throughout the coming months, go to the Connected Educator website.
