Hello WEx community, I’m Courtney, the new Outreach Manager here at WEx. I’m really excited about joining your community and the WEx team! My previous work has familiarized me with some areas of education technology, but my perspective has been a step back from many people here in the community.
Fortunately for me I’ve started at WEx during Connected Educator Month (CEM). I spent my first few weeks immersing myself in the WEx Community and using CEM as an opportunity to learn about how education technology can better support educators. It’s been an inspiring demonstration of how committed many educators are to improving education and an eye-opening tutorial about the challenges they face.
But why is it so hard? How can technology help?
Here are a few things that stood out to me:
There are lots of different ideas about what it means to be a ‘connected educator’. To some it’s as simple as subscribing to blogs, to others it’s a commitment to conversation and collaboration across many channels.
The most meaningful connections are built informally by motivated people who are independently discovering and using a variety of tools to create them. As a result, focused communities are growing on independent platforms and remain unlinked to the broader educational community.
It is difficult for educators to engage the divergent thinking of other communities, and they don’t have a lot of opportunities to do so. New spaces can be hard to find and don’t always feel welcoming. In addition, the language people use and domain expertise can create barriers to communicating.
Despite these challenges, there are a number of fearless leaders who eagerly use technology for personal learning and professional development. Listening to them share their needs over the last few weeks has reinforced my belief that WEx supports people who do really important work. Linking diverse individuals and ideas to global conversations is essential to innovating in education.
I’m encouraged by the commitment of educators and delighted to be working with a community designed to support them. As outreach manager, my job is to get the conversation going. How do you feel about my initial observations? What are some challenges you face in staying connected? Leave a comment and let me know.
This post was first published at workingexamples.org.