Connecting Voices Communicating

  Professional Development Connections As an active educator, I sought professional development on education, service learning, and teaching Spanish in person and online. In the last 20 years of my career, two pieces of training were of note.  The first training of note was when I attended two Harvard Project Zero , Teaching for Understanding Summer Institutes.  At the first institute in 1996, I learned how to connect teaching languages to the arts, Multiple Intelligences, rubrics, and reflection at the heart of learning.  In the second institute in 2000, I created the Service-Learning Program I implemented at Casady School during my 18-year tenure at that institution.  The second training of note, came on a yearly basis from 2000 to 2018  when a selected number of students and I attended NYLC Annual Service-Learning Conferences and Bi-Annual Global Service Learning Research Conferences   At those conferences, my students participated and presented project initiatives at the national

Emails - Blogger - Facetime/Facebook - Texts - What's Up - Tweeter - Zoom Connections The World Wide Cloud From phone calls to emails to text to FaceTime:   Before 2020, my contact with family was sporadic phone calls, annual visits, and family reunions in person.  I had given up my negativity towards texting, "I might distract people while driving.  Nothing is so important that I cannot send via email."  During 2020, I began to text Bitmojis, musical and how-to videos, pictures, Facebook posts. Then, when one of my sisters faced health challenges, the other one united us in supporting each other with weekly FaceTime check-ins.  As the pandemic continued, one of my sisters enjoyed FaceTime connections so much that we began a daily FaceTime call, which we continue to this day.  In the initial days of the lockdown, my son and his wife needed a way for my toddler grandchildren to communicate with "Grandma and Viejo" to provide some sort of normality to the passing

During the Covid-19 Pandemic, communication with the world has been through media, social media, zoom, text, What's Up, and FaceTime connections.  What connections were made and why?  When did those connections start?  How did they evolve during the Covid-19 Pandemic?  What are the effects of those connections?  I will answer those questions through reflective posts in this blog. iPhone and iPad:  These two devices opened a world of possibilities I did not realize I had at my fingertips.  I was lucky to receive both devices as gifts.  The world of apps such as FlipGrip, Padlets, TunaTuner, Vimeo, YouTube, Google Meets, Google Docs, Google Classroom, Zoom empowered me to virtually participate in life without leaving my home.   I am still more comfortable in my Samsung home computer, but the iPhone and the iPad are beginning to be my best online enablers. When I return to substitute work, I will have to decide what type of laptop to get, an Apple or a Microsoft, my first enabler.  Me