Learning Communities Get Online!

NCTAF and Pearson are excited to announce a new partnership to launch a new online learning community designed to support teacher candidates and novice teachers with a broad network of mentors and experienced talent, and to connect colleges of education with their K-12 district partners. The partnership will build on our current TLINC (Teachers Learning in Networked Communities) project.

NCTAF’s TLINC program is a significant innovation because it represents a major change from the standard practice of preparing teachers in isolation from the schools where they will serve, and then placing them as stand-alone teachers in self-contained classrooms. TLINC provides a professional learning community that expands and enhances face-to-face mentoring with online coaching and opportunities for facilitated reflection and peer collaboration to improve teaching quality and student achievement. TLINC gives teacher candidates and novice teachers the support of an interactive network composed of their preparation faculty, their peers and colleagues, and accomplished teachers who are only a click away when they need help with student learning, classroom management, or a curriculum design problem.

TLINC is one way NCTAF is helping to create learning communities in a 21st century, digital and global economy! Are online communities for teachers the wave of the future?

Social Networking: It's Not Just for the Students!

Everyone’s doing it. Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Twitter, LinkedIn. Social networking has consumed our society. And while many of us think of social networking as a way to share photos or tell all of our 585902 friends what we ate for lunch, for the education community, it’s becoming so much more than that.

Online teacher networks are becoming increasingly popular. Education Week’s recent article on TLINC (Teachers Learning in Network Communities) highlights just one way NCTAF is trying to promote a culture of collaboration in education. With sites in Denver, Memphis and Seattle, TLINC is providing future teachers and their peers with ways to connect at anytime – much like they do it their personal lives with texting, emailing and social networking. In states like Colorado where wilderness is vast and your colleagues may be miles away, it provides the instant support that so many teachers wish they had. But a teacher in an urban Seattle school may be just as isolated in her own classroom and an online community provides a chance to connect when she might not have the opportunity in her own school.

Programs like TLINC represent a major systemic change from the standard practice of preparing teachers in isolation from the schools where they will serve, and then placing them as stand-alone teachers in self-contained classrooms. TLINC provides a professional learning community that expands and enhances face-to-face mentoring. The online community capitalizes on the expertise of people with a variety of skill levels: pre-service teachers can collaborate with their university faculty as well offer insight to their peers. Providing teachers and teacher candidates with the support they need, whether it be in problem-solving, classroom management or curriculum design, is one of the keys to moving our education system into the 21st century.

At NCTAF’s 2008 Symposium several other new online networking sites were featured. Including the Illinois New Teacher Collaborative and South Carolina’s SCteachervillage.com.

How are you using social networking as a tool for educators, and how can we embrace this online culture of collaboration rather than hide behind a firewall?

This is a kind of peer pressure that is good to feel. So come on, get online. Everyone’s doing it.

Listen to Cindy Gutierrez, the director of initial professional teacher education at the Univeristy of Colorado at Denver, discuss TLINC!