From: mkennedy@shentel.net (Marilyn Kennedy)
Subject: Online Colleagues
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 12:18:48 -0500
Dear Joseph, I also would like to echo the sentiments so nicely expressed by Charlotte Stevens. I think these are thoughts shared by so many of us. Through this discuss-lfm group, I have been able to share ideas, information, and visions with my online colleagues involved in this project. Through this discussion group, we as teachers have been able to share our inspirations and our experiences with our fellow teachers, helping one another learn new technologies and strategies to promote active learning and enthusiastic interaction. It is through this discussion group, I have learned to do videoconferencing, digital imaging, and robotics. Through this discussion group, I have been afforded the unique opportunity to interact and collaborate among fellow PTK educators and their students, exchanging ideas, lessons, and experiences, sharing a rich array of local, national, and global resources and tools that I might otherwise not discover. Even when questions have been directed towards one specific person I am glad that they ARE shared because it gives me another opportunity to learn. I frequently found that information shared was equally helpful to me, and perhaps answered a question I had not got around to asking and in many times solved a problem I was encountering myself. And as various teachers shared their classrom experiences with a particular activity, my students and I became caught up in the excitement of that activity and found ourselves wanting to join in. So often teachers (especially elementary teachers in self-contained classrooms like myself) are isolated by our classroom walls, and this online communication is our main avenue of support and professional dialogue. And whenever I have done presentations at various conferences about PTK, newcomers to the PTK program are reassured by this avenue of online of support and dialogue. Establishing a network with other PTK advocates has empowered me and provided me with the building blocks as I work toward my vision for "real science with real scientists in real time" through the use of technology and telecommunications. It has become the springboard by which my students and I have become a part of the community of learners poised on the brink of the 21st century. Marilyn K. Wall John Wayland Elementary Bridgewater, VA