 My name is Mark Carbone. I currently serve as the Chief Information Officer for the Waterloo Region District School Board. In this digital age, it's certainly an exciting time in K-12 education, and all I can think about really is opportunities and possibilities. I'm very interested in the notion of technology-enabled learning and studying how technology best serves student learning needs. There's some very interesting models out there right now. The TPAC model where we examine the relationship between pedagogy, content knowledge, and the use of technology. There's the SAMR model, which looks at four levels of use of technology starting at the S level for substitution, where technology is really just used to replace a manual or paper-based process all the way up to the redefinition level, where technology is used to explore and enhance student learning in ways that were not previously possible. Many books and articles written about education also refer to the seas, and I think this is an area where technology shines. Character education, citizenship, communication, critical thinking and problem solving, collaboration, and creativity and imagination. But in some ways, I think there's one scene missing, and I'd like to put the spotlight on what I would consider the missing sea. To me, the missing sea is connected learning and leading. I firmly believe that today's students need connected leaders and teachers who can role model connected, collaborative, and self-directed learning as part of their daily practice. So I think we're really starting to recognize the importance of being connected, and we want our leaders to be connected. Including those structures in place that help them to very quickly learn the tools and to get connected to places where they can enhance their own learning. Because it's really important that they're modeling the kind of learning that you want to see in the classroom. Well, thanks very much for inviting me, and I'm excited to be able to really, you know, process all the great things we've been doing at West Heights and kind of take my thinking and make it more transparent and be that reflective practitioner that I'm wanting to be. So I started off as a lurker on Twitter, not even having an account, just kind of looking at the different things and then moving towards having a school account. And it was through the school account and pushing out information about events at school and following educators and different educational groups that I discovered that there was some real learning for me as an administrator that I wanted to tap into this collective intelligence that was out there. So then I moved to having a personal Twitter account that at first was locked and then transitioned into having an open account where I was that digital leader being very intentional about what I posted because I had, you know, trustees following me, superintendents, parents, as well as students. So that was kind of the transition. Twitter was my tool to connect to that, you know, collective intelligence and that diversity of ideas and perspectives. Well, I would have to say that it has changed how I learned completely. I started getting connected about 2008 on Twitter, and then I connected at an OTF event with other educators in Ontario who were using Twitter. I wasn't a big user in 2008. I really didn't see the value of telling people where I was or, you know, what I was doing at the time. That didn't help me out. But once I got connected to the right people that I met through this event, and I believe you would have been one of those people pretty close to 2008, people like Doug Peterson, Zoe Branigan-Pipe, you know, bloggers from around the province, that kind of thing. Once I got connected to those folks and realized how generous people were with sharing and sort of could watch how they were learning and look at some of the folks that they were following, then it really blew open the learning for me. It was like having a global staff room. Maya, you call a journey as a connected leader, began a lot with Futures Form. I had dabbled a little bit with some social media before that, but I always, as a teacher, thought, oh, maybe it's better to go as a student in it and just sort of explore the world quietly and not let other people know. But when we began the Futures Form project, we had, we joined the PLP network. And they encouraged us. They said that if you don't control your digital footprint, then someone else would be in charge of it. So if I'm not looking after how my name is used, my name can look, I don't look after how that's being used in the media and social media, then someone else might be adding my name to a picture or putting my name out there. So I took that, and Futures Form, we were beginning to explore social media, so I joined Facebook and Twitter. I've since joined Google+, Pinterest with my name. And so my name's out there, and I connect with people under my name. So now if you Google search my name, then it's mature that I've put out on the Internet, so I've taken control of my brand. So as a connected individual then, I've grown so much as a teacher and as a system leader from being able to reach out with other educators. I found Twitter to be an absolute mind of resources and information that I've selected educators to follow. For me, Twitter is a primarily professional tool. I follow educators, and I get resources. I get links. I get videos. I get sound clips of things that are useful for me in my job and working with teachers. Connected for me means growing my professional learning community, and that's through all of my social media connections. I have to admit that I was maybe a little bit late to the Twitter game, but I've progressed through all the steps of Twitter done, if you will, and it has become my number one professional learning tool. I don't know how anyone is engaged. Anyone in our role today is engaged in the Twitterverse to enhance the professional learning. Well, I mean, I think about my purpose in being connected, and my purpose is I'm looking out for my learning, which in turn is going to impact my teachers and then of course the final goal of the students in impacting and enhancing their learning. So it was looking for taking a look at what I'm doing in my school and having that growth mindset, knowing that I'm doing it this way, but there are all of these other ways that are out there. So for me, it was learning all about the educational technology that was out there, great instructional strategies like it was through being connected on Twitter and through educational chats and EdCamp style chats where I learned about flipped classroom, project-based learning, inquiry model of learning, you name it, genius hour, global read aloud. So it was getting that wealth of information through the wide variety of people that I followed and then taking that information and then applying it to, you know, Steven Katz talks about your classroom, well, my classroom is my school, my students are my teachers. So seeing how I can take all that information and transfer it into my school. My goal is as a leader then to help other teachers come online. So when I'm working with teachers in the teacher learning project, part of my presentation when I work with Harry Neeson is the message to teachers is become connected, develop a personal learning network and join networks where you can work with other people. The other thing, I was connected to those people at Epo quite a bit too, but that was once a year for me experience. So this led us stay connected virtually over the period of time, you know, the whole school year and beyond and that was really amazing. So I would say it changed really everything about how I learned now. It's been amazing for me. I mean, I've connected with you. I've connected with your with through you to many of the colleagues that you work with and through many of my other people that that I follow to their colleagues. And with that, you get so much breadth of information, breadth of knowledge. And, you know, a lot of times it's the challenges filtering at all. But that's something, you know, as you talk about working your way through the levels of Twitter, you get to the point where you learn how to filter and, you know, focus on what's important to you at that point in time in your day or in your career or wherever the case may be. I enjoy creating and so I like to create resources. And quite often the slides I create for PowerPoint, so when I find a good quote, even if it's not at the times a quote I would be using, then I will create a slide and save it for later. And my save it for later file is Flickr. I'll create slides ahead of time from the summer reading from something I read at home and I'll create a slide for it and just store it on Flickr. Well, Flickr then serves as a way of networking with people. I'm popping it out there so other people can use it, even if I'm not ready to use it in the presentation. I find it kind of interesting, rewarding, pleasing to know that people are looking at these files and I'm storing them on Flickr and reading them. I've got a couple slides that I created that have been read over 6,000 times and to think that 6,000 people have read this quotation because I thought it would be useful for one of my presentations, maybe they're finding it useful. Seeing how I can take all that information and transfer it into my school. So for example, staff meetings. I found that staff meetings, teachers weren't getting the staff learning that they needed. We took a staff meeting and we created an ed camp style of staff meeting where staff basically posted what they were interested in and then we had leaders who stepped up and were able to speak to those different topics and so we had our staff meeting, the staff learning portion took place in different rooms, different topics that catered those teachers' interests. So that's something then that I would like for teachers to think about that self-directed learning in their classrooms and catering to what students need in their learning, where they're at. What is their innate curiosity? What do they want to explore? So I'm leading by example there. So that's an example of something being connected, how I applied that to the school. I wonder if we might close out our time here by having you share maybe something about a social media connected learning project that perhaps one of the teachers at your school is doing. We launched one today actually. We are connecting in a, there's an organization called the International Education Resource Network and it's a global group of teachers who do connected projects. They've been doing this for a long time and the one that we're going to participate in is with Japan. It's called Art Miles. So we're connected with a classroom in Japan and we will together, the two classes, we'll have some video conferences that go on and we're going to determine a theme for a mural that we're going to create. So they're going to create half of the mural in Japan and then they're going to ship it to us and we're going to create the other half and then send it back and these get posted at an international conference in Japan. So today we were on Google Earth, we were going down to the city and the elementary school where these children are from and we're planning how we're going to introduce ourselves to our partner class. So it was a great way to break down the walls of the classroom. I mean we're very up on the social media, we've got a Twitter feed, we've got an Instagram, we've got almost half of our students, 275 I think at last count that are following us on Instagram. Wonderful. The goal on Instagram is twofold. It is to give students and parents, we've got parents as well, that information with different events and activities that are happening in the school, highlight really cool things happening with educational technology or assemblies, but also to give students that authentic environment to show us that they can be positive digital citizens and digital leaders because we need those teaching and learning opportunities so they can make mistakes so that we can address, these are the expectations of a good digital leader. This is how you can show that and what better way to do that in having an open Twitter feed, open Instagram and encouraging students to post. So the one thing that all of the stories have in common is that it's learners who are very passionate about learning together and become connected. What we're doing here is we're modeling the kind of learning that we like to see for our students. Our students are also on a path of learning and our work as educators is to make sure that they continue on that pathway. Connected learners need connected leaders.