A teacher and educational technologist is writing an article for a professional magazine. The topic is crowdsourcing. To illustrate how crowdsourcing works, she decides to crowdsource something that her readers might find useful – tips for teachers new to using technology in the classroom. She has a good online professional network via Facebook and Twitter (and Google+ when she remembers). So she posts to her Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts asking her network for (brief) tips. Within 12 hours she has a pile of tips from practising, experienced teachers. She has crowdsourced info from a bunch of savvy educationalists, who have come up with a great range of tips reflecting all sorts of contexts and concerns – far richer than anything she could have come up with by herself. This is the wisdom of the (right) crowd.
The teacher above is of course me, and the tips were provided by my PLN (Personal Learning Network). The article I’m writing has a word limit of 900 words. Too short to include all the tips. So here they are: