This week I will address how do my interactions with students, teachers, supervisors or parents make use of Communications & Collaboration? What is most surprising to me in these interactions? Most of the time, I e-mail constantly or text using my phone. I prefer people to text or e-mail me because I am not always available by phone and I rarely check my voicemail. Texting and e-mail is a 24 hour, seven-days-a-week and I can answer them at 10 at night or 6 in the morning without waking anyone up. It is really convenient. I communicate with my students mostly by direct interaction. I give them assignments on the computer which they share with me and I write back comments. I would probably say this occurs about 10% during class time. Some of my students use independent study programs where I e-mail comments to them after I grade their work. I collaborate with other teachers through our PLC in meetings. I also share almost all of my documents with other teachers through Google. While my PLC work together on shared themes in math, english and history we do not necessarily share the same methodology of teaching the curriculum. I have incorporated most of my lessons through Google and they use other ways.

I'm not really surprised by the interactions I have. I teach in an isolated classroom away from a school. Besides working in my PLC, I do not have much contact with other teachers, supervisors or parents. While I can contact parents to discuss school related issues, I am apprehensive to deal with parents whose children are incarcerated. I would prefer to talk to them face-to-face, but there is not much opportunity for this to occur.

The second thing I need to address is which modalities, strategies and tools do I use most often and which modalities could I use more often in collaboration and communication. As stated before, I e-mail and text when I have time to respond to another's communication. In the mornings, before school starts, I fill out attendance in a google sheet that I share with the Edops secretary but this is still more asynchronous than synchronous. I rarely communicate synchronously unless I am in a situation such as a class where I am given an assignment and need to answer the assignment within a specific time period.

The opposite is true with collaboration. I think that I am much more synchronous in collaboration efforts, mostly because the collaborations I am involved are structured and have a time table. Occasionally they can be asynchronous as I run into people in person or online where we discuss a shared issues.  

Can I be more collaborative and communicative in different ways than I already am? I'm sure I can. I usually change the way I do things when something isn't working or I have the opportunity to see or learn a new way that I find to be beneficial.  Sometimes, it may not be my ideas to make the changes, but I will need to go with it becuase it is the new way of doing things.