Like many of the people in my Personal Learning Network (PLN), I do some training on creating, building, and maintaining a PLN. Some teachers get it. Some don’t. That’s OK. Some want to get it, but are not sure it is really something they need. Or want. This post is for those teachers. Everyone else can move along to something more interesting.
If you read my blog at all, you will know that in the past few days I attended a presentation for SMART and Promethean boards hosted by our district. You will also know that the SMART reseller in charge of the demonstration did not do a great job. I was very disappointed because I knew many of the things SMART is capable of, and we did not get to see those. In addition, you will know that SMART is doing everything it can to make up for the problem.
What you don’t know yet (unless you’ve read the comments on my last blog post) is the power of a complaint (or concern, or praise, or whatever) when it is given in the context of a PLN.
I had already told two members of PLN about the problem. Both are SMART certified trainers. They are passionate about SMART technology. They got the word to SMART for me within a matter of hours, maybe minutes.
But then I saw this comment from Gerard Newsome on my last post:
Thanks for giving a tweet on this. I was able to send this site to my director who just came from a SMART camp in Canada.
Only yesterday she made several calls and was contacted by several SMART regional directors and the CEO about this. They were interested in how she heard about it. They were amazed at how the news traveled so fast…and far.
Gerard is the man singly responsible for putting me in the Discovery Educator Network (DEN) which is the foundation of my PLN. I had lost track of Gerard over the last couple of years. And in case you need some translation, my blog is automatically posted to Twitter and Facebook. Gerard saw my post on Twitter and sent the blog to his director. And look what happened. Several regional directors and the CEO of SMART contacted this person to find out how they knew about the situation so quickly.
How did they know? Because my PLN was put into action.
I would like to think that my little blog post stuck out in the nether regions of the vast empty space of the Internet had some impact on SMART. But it didn’t. They would never have known about this incident at all except for three others who knew. And they contacted some people. And those people contacted some people. And it snowballed into something much more than it was at the beginning.
The end result is that SMART gets a do-over. They have been invited by our district to try again. Our teachers deserve to see what SMART can do. They deserve to see these products in action as they are meant to be used. The classroom experience of over 10,000 students is at stake.
Still wonder if you need to develop a PLN?