A World of Colleagues

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Social Media has broadened the collegial community to a worldwide collection of educators.  Twitter, blogs and other networks provide a knowledge exchange that's invaluable to professional growth and development which in turn has helped many educators to teach children with greater resources, tools and skill.

While school-level colleagues provide a close knit group of educators to collaborate with on  specific goals and efforts, colleagues across the globe serve to introduce strategies, tools, literature and books that reflect many faces of education.

Similar to the way artisans have shared their craft with each other through trade, teachers trade ideas mostly without fee by freely posting and exchanging words and materials via social media.  In the past, our learning was mainly limited to our school communities, attendance at conferences and published texts, but now there's a worldwide free flow of ideas for the taking.

Those in the private industry recognize the value of this free flow of ideas, and there's definitely a movement towards making money from this knowledge exchange. I hope we'll be able to keep the free flow of educational thought and ideas open for all educators as this exchange is serving to better teach children all over the globe.