Staff Survey

As the new school year approaches, I find it very important to develop a concept that can help our staff move forward.  After a long conversation with my principal, we have agreed that we would like to see our staff develop and grow their PLNs.  We believe that there are some areas that our teachers can use to grow as teachers and members of our learning community.  After reading material from Jeff Utecht (see previous post) and Will Richardson, the online tools that can be utilized are:

Twitter
Google Docs
Blogging - Blogspot or Wordpress
Photosharing
Social Bookmarking - Diigo or Delicious
RSS

We've put together a survey for our staff using Google Docs.  We created a form that they can fill out quickly to inform us of their current use and also state a goal for their development in the area of social media.  The data will then be collected in a spreadsheet that can be analyzed to establish our needed steps to help the staff move forward.  We are interested to see where we start - and also know who can be leaders in the movement.  We believe we have some "closet twitterers" that would be willing to help spread the word of what great connections can be made.

After we get the results of the survey, we'll share them (generically, of course).  We are really curious to see if there is an enthusiasm to move into this realm.  Teachers tend to share with their neighbor teachers, but sometimes hesitate to throw their experiences out to the world.  We will make it our mission to convince them that there are many of teachers that can benefit from the sharing of ideas.  Social sharing is a good thing.  Teachers can gain professionally and personally.