An Ontario Response

Recently, Shannon Smith (@shannoninottawa) shared a blog post from Chris Kennedy @chrkennedy entitled “Education and Social Media” which talked about the use of Social Media in British Columbia.  Shannon is a big reader of education blogs so I knew that this would be good read.  And, it was.  Of course, the #1 imposed over the west-most province was intriguing.

In the post, Mr. Kennedy identified seven things that he thought British Columbia was uniquely #1 in their implementation of social media.  It’s very difficult to argue since there was no statistics to prove the points but they are very admirable.  Shannon and I had a little back and forth and we had a meeting of the minds – hey, this would be a good basis for a blog post response on the View from Ontario.

A couple of exchanges later and Shannon had created a Google Document and invited me to help edit.  As we were working together on the document, she exchanged a thought in the sidebar “Would be cool to get a bunch of folks involved” and invited anyone in to help with the document.  The result is a complete blog post.  Since it was Shannon’s original document, the entire post will appear on her blog and she indicated that she’s got it scheduled for 7am.

Like the original, there aren’t statistics to back up any of the claims but the post does address Kennedy’s seven original points with some very concrete, Ontario examples.  The post isn’t meant to be part of a spitting match but hopefully it inspires some thinking.  Are the points good for a discussion of where we are and where we need to go?  Are we there yet?  If not, what’s it going to take to get there?  Where is there?

Please take your time to share your thoughts at Shannon’s blog.

Regardless of where you stand, there is a nice group of Ontario Educators doing some amazing things regularly with social media.

Check out the Ontario Educators on Twitter.

And, of course, the list of Ontario Edubloggers, which was expanded this week to include a new grouping “Parents/School Advocates”.