Tapped-In Reflection

This semester I used Tapped-In for the first time and it has been an awesome experience. At first it took me a while to get into it and find it helpful, but after playing with it and reading everyone posts I began to get excited about it. I look forward to coming back to my email and reading the responses people have or the new threads that have been started. I found that for a while I didn't have anything to say in response to others posts so I just did a lot of reading and little to no posting. Then I decided to start my own topics...I used ideas that I had been thinking of in other education classes or paper topics I had in my other courses. This program has been an invaluable resource. It is a great collaboration tool and is especially unique because of the diverse group of educators involved. It was neat to hear experiences from seasoned educators, new teachers, administrators and other pre-service teachers from all over the world. What I enjoyed the most is when someone found something new that would be helpful in the classroom and they shared it in a post; my bookmark list has grown tremendously from saving those links. It has also been helpful that our entries are only visible to the people in our group, which makes it much more comfortable to pose questions and express discomforts or uncertainties. I don't think I would have spoken as freely if I thought a potential employer could see what I wrote.

Tapped-In has also been nice because it gives all of us a place to share our experiences, thoughts, joys and frustrations throughout the semester. With class periods only being 50 minutes it is hard sometimes to chat with the other pre-service teachers about what they are doing in the classroom, how their lessons have gone and what they have learned. I have really enjoyed reading people's experiences and seeing what they are doing for projects. I really think that if we didn't have this tool there would be a lot more chatting during class so we can catch up with each other. It was also great to have access to the discussions for the other class that is in their full time experience now because they were able to give some insight on what full time student teaching will be like and what some of the frustrations may be.

The mentors have really given some great insight into their past experiences, have been great collaborators and amazing comforters. I was really impressed by how many people respond to any question that is posed...and if they didn't know how to help they definitely suggested other resources that may be useful. It was just amazing to be collaborating with such experienced, intelligent and dedicated individuals. I am so thankful that Sheryl was able to get these fabulous women and men to dedicate their time. I must say I have been quite excited when I get responses to some of my threads or to my blogs from our mentors. I feel like I am talking to someone famous!

This tool would be great when I become a teacher and I really hope I get the opportunity to use it. I think it would be awesome to set it up within a school or even a school system. There could be one for all of the elementary school teachers in a specific county where they are able to share ideas, ask and answer questions, collaborate and network. This would connect an entire county or city of teachers and their wonderful ideas that would have otherwise never spoken to each other. It would also be cool to set up a pen pal session with a few classes from different schools where the students can create threads and post questions to other students to ask for help, share ideas, or just learn what life is like in their end of the world. I definitely want to use it in my classroom as a learning tool to spread the wealth of knowledge my students will have, but at the least I think it would be great to introduce it to the school system I work in to use as a collaborative tool within the county.