TT: Why did you initially decide to become a teacher?  
BH: Even in high school, I had a drive to help others learn. I volunteered to tutor middle school students and really enjoyed building those relationships. During college, I worked in the summers as an instructor with an adventure learning program, ActionQuest, and continued to be involved in tutoring programs through Boys Hope/Girls Hope. Entering the classroom ultimately seemed like a logical step.

TT: How did you move from being a classroom teacher to being a consultant / writer? 
BH: After my first year as a 9th grade English teacher, I was never really a traditional classroom teacher. I worked as a full-time substitute for a year, then as a government consultant, and finally as the Director of Academic Technology before joining EdTechTeacher. When I moved from a school environment to the EdTechTeacher environment, it had more to do with scale. I really wanted to be able to support a larger group of teachers beyond just one school. I now have the opportunity to travel and learn from educators around the world.
 
This same drive to make connections and offer support also drives my writing though I’ve loved to write since I was little. In fact, my initial career ambition was to be a Muppet! In January 2011, I broke my leg and spent seven months on the couch. The only way that I could keep contributing and sharing was through writing. I just haven’t stopped since.

TT: How have you gained your following on social media do you think? Top tips?  
BH: I find social media and the notion of “followers” to be strange. I honestly have not spent any time trying to build any sort of following. Over the past few years, I’ve used social media as a way to connect to other educators, engage in conversation, and try to be as helpful as possible to other teachers. By sharing resources, writing posts, and answering questions, it seems as though people have decided to follow me. I see that as a really huge responsibility. It means that if I say something via social media, it should have value. I am honored to know that anyone who follows me actually thinks I may have something valuable to contribute to the broader educational conversation.

TT: Why do you think it is important to grow as a teacher / share your ideas with others?  
BH: I think that as teachers, we have to model what it looks like to be a good learner. The world is constantly changing and adapting, so as teachers, we need to as well. Additionally, there are always so many new technologies and resources becoming available to make learning even more engaging, dynamic, and fun. It feels almost like professional malpractice to not be trying things out and sharing new discoveries.

TT: Which are the top 3-5 pieces of work you'd like us to share in this blog and why?
BH: That’s a really tough question! I’m proud of the work that I’ve published with Edutopia. It’s exciting to be part of that community because everyone shares a similar passion to support teachers.
 
I also really like this article on Using Design Thinking to Bridge Theory and Practice with Digital Portfolios because it afforded me an opportunity to reflect on the process of teaching reflection. In a lot of ways, this article shows my growth and shift in thinking about how to teach reflection. I’ve changed a lot of my approaches over the past few months as a result of that experience. In particular, I really focus on the notion of empathy. I try to encourage teachers to experience learning in a similar manner as their students and to consider how their students might choose to demonstrate their understanding.
 
Finally, I gave a TEDx talk a few years ago. I think I spent more time preparing for those 12 minutes than any other talk I have ever delivered. However, I think it also represents a significant shift in my thinking as it may have been the first time that I crafted a message that got beyond the concept of a single device or platform. In preparing for the talk, I was really inspired by Grant Lichtman’s book, The Falconer. He challenges that beyond asking why, we need to start asking what if? That single notion made me start thinking about the critical skills for success in a digital era because what if students could learn any time and anywhere, what if students could demonstrate their understanding through a number of modalities, what if teachers could virtually transport their students anywhere in the universe… Planning for that talk inspired me to think beyond the immediacy of the technology and towards the potential of teaching and learning.

TT: Why did you initially decide to become a teacher?
SM: I knew I wanted to be a teacher my senior year in High School. I just felt that I could help people and help to make school meaningful to them. I've always wanted to make learning relevant and allow people to express themselves in their learning.  
 
TT: How did you move from being a classroom teacher to being a consultant / writer?
SM: I never gave up one for the other. I am still a classroom teacher and a department chair. I love to be able to go to schools and work with them as they try to address their needs and implement new technology. I always grow from the experience and I am able to bring something back that helps my students.  
 
TT: How have you gained your following on social media do you think? Top tips?
SM: I started on twitter just listening, but things got really good when I started sharing my practice and accepting feedback. That’s why I initially started using Google Docs. Eventually I went on to organize the #sschat community for several years. After that I created the #1to1techat community and ran that for several years. Both of those gave me the chance to travel and meet many people across the country. Those relationships led to working with EdTechTeacher. My twitter followers are built from working within all of those communities and sharing my teaching practice.  

My best advice is for you to go where you grow and share what you learn. Someone out there is walking the same path and will appreciate what you do.  
 
TT: Why do you think it is important to grow as a teacher / share your ideas with others?
SM: Sharing your practice and contributing to others is a way to gain valuable feedback. Since I have been sharing on twitter I have seen much of my work improved by others. The overall result is better quality materials, better ideas and more options to help my students in the classroom.  
 
TT: Which are the top 3-5 pieces of work you'd like us to share in this blog and why? 
SM: I am most proud of some of the work my students have created in class. Those assignments represent the freedom to express learning in multiple ways. I am inspired by the creativity that these awesome students put into their work. 

• Adam Smith vs. Karl Marx
• Wage Inequality

I'm also pretty proud of my Mindshift series on the New Economy of Information.  This series helps me to articulate my understanding of life in the modern classroom. 

Thank you, Shawn. We love seeing incredible student work. TechnoTeachers, what thoughts or new ideas do you have after reading Shawn’s interview? ​​

TT:  Why did you initially decide to become a teacher?
MP: For as long as I can remember, I have loved to learn and loved the idea of working with students. Back in high school, I began to research approaches to early care and education and the more I learned, the more curious I became about how young children learn. After living abroad and later studying in Reggio Emilia, Italy as part of my undergraduate degree, I realized that teachers could truly be global facilitators of learning relationships. I became a teacher because I wanted to work with students and help them discover their own curiosities and explore ways to share them with others, particularly using technology as a tool to connect with others around the world.
 
TT:  How did you move from being a classroom teacher to being a consultant/writer?
MP: While I was getting my Master’s degree in International Training and Education, I started working as an Education and Technology Consultant. I supported early childhood clients in web development and social media and international development clients in using technology to build digital communities. When I began teaching, I continued to work with organizations around education and technology, with a focus on early childhood, global education, and design thinking. Currently, I balance the two roles, keeping active in the classroom and doing consulting work, locally and globally.  


 
TT: How have you gained your following on social media do you think? Top tips?
MP: My social media presence is something that has grown organically over time. I have been on Twitter since 2009 and over the years, as I have participated in and helped facilitate EdCamps, ed tech conferences, and global partnerships, my PLN has greatly increased. Being active in a number of Twitter chats has been another important way for me to connect with new people through that medium. Each tool is different, so in Google+, my following is based around G+ Communities and MOOCs or groups I am a part of related to those communities and on LinkedIn, my connections are a mix of past professional connections and groups I have participated in or managed for other organizations.
 
My tips would be:

• Be professional.
• Be authentic.
• Let your passion show.
• Build in time each day or week to check-in with your social network(s) of choice to stay up-to-date and inspired.
• Use hashtags and tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to manage the constant flow of information and connections you make.
• Use lists to stay organized and find specific groups of people.
• Find new followers by joining chats and looking at who the people that inspire you follow.

 
TT: Why do you think it is important to grow as a teacher / share your ideas with others?
MP: I think it is extremely important to continue growing as a teacher because it helps you to stay engaged as a learner and aware of the experiences students are having today in and out of the classroom. By sharing your ideas with others, you can become part of their professional learning networks and develop reciprocal teaching and learning relationships with others. By sharing my own ideas, I have a chance to reflect on my own practice and get feedback from educators and ed tech organizations about tools and pedagogical approaches that might enhance students’ learning and I can also offer the same to others through my blog and social networks.  
 
TT:  Which are the top 3-5 pieces of work you'd like us to share in this blog and why? 
MP: Here are my top picks.

1. How to Draw a PLN (2015 update here) - this is a post on my personal blog that readers might find interesting since it goes into more depth about what my PLN looks like and how I developed my social media connections.
2. Adventuring with Dash & Dot - this is a post on my school blog about some of our work with the Wonder Workshop robots. Teaching coding with our teachers and students is one of the most fun parts of my job and I love to talk about it with others.
3. 365 Days of Glass - this is a blog I keep of my explorations and experimentations using Google Glass with students. Although the Explorer program has ended, we continue to use Glass as a seamless tool to document moments of learning and discovery. 
4.  #EAInnovates Day 1 - Storify is one of my favorite tools to curate learning experiences. Anytime I go to a conference or workshop or moderate a Twitter chat, I try to capture it using Storify so that I can share what I learn with others and offer it as a resources that can be returned to at any time. This particular link is to the first day of a four-day teacher workshop I facilitate each summer, usually around design thinking and tinkering.

You can find more about Margaret by following her on her website—a virtual résumé
blog. Let us know what you think!

TT: Why did you initially decide to become a teacher?
LN: I found school boring and irrelevant. That ticked me off so I became a public school educator who works to help change that for others.
 
TT: How did you move from being a classroom teacher to being a writer?
LN: I didn’t move from being a teacher to a writer. I do both. My first inspiration was Teachers College Writing Workshop from Lucy Calkins. I was a literacy coach. The program teaches teachers and coaches that if we are going to teach writing, we should be writers who publish our work. I took that advice to heart and started writing. I launched my blog in 2008 where I began writing articles that received attention. As a result, various outlets and publishers contacted me to write for them.
 
TT: How have you gained your following on social media do you think? Top tips?
LN: I never tried to gain a following on social media. What I tried to do is share my voice on topics about which I was passionate. It often takes courage to put in writing what others are also thinking, but may be afraid to say. Everything I article I write has an audience of at least one. This means all my writing has at least one follower and usually there are others who are interested.

• Here is how I get ideas for my blog.
• Here are some ways I’ve gotten Twitter followers.
• Here are some strategies I have used that have resulted in an increase in my blog readership.

TT: Why do you think it is important to grow as a teacher / share your ideas with others?
LN: Sharing your ideas helps you develop and articulate them more clearly. This helps you grow. It’s important to grow so we can serve students, staff, and families as effectively as possible. Sharing also enables you to grow your professional learning network. Learning networks are perhaps the most important resource for educators. It provides thousands of experts who are available anytime, anywhere for mutual support.  
 
TT: Which are the top 3-5 pieces of work you'd like us to share in this blog and why?
LN: I think I’d like to focus on some of my work that addresses fear. Educators and parents often have unsubstantiated fear around the use of technology. I’ve written some pieces to address this fear.

1) Screentime
Screentime is an issue I write about often. I want readers to stop focusing on limiting screentime and start focusing on the learning that is taking place “behind the screens.” We don’t limit reading time or writing. Similarly we shouldn’t limit screentime. Here is my latest article on the topic. 
 
2) Social Media
We can’t be surprised when young people are not using social media responsibly if adults don’t guide them in responsible use. Here are ten tips for teens using social media.
 
3) Cell Phones
There’s been some disturbing studies about how banning cell phones increases student achievement. There are several flaws with the study. First, research shows that 20th century assessments seriously underestimate the abilities of 21st century students. Second, schools in the study view cell phones as weapons of mass destruction rather than embracing them as tools of engagement. When we stop fighting and start incorporating the tools of student’s world into learning, everybody wins. Here is an article I wrote on this topic.
 
4) My books!
I love writing books about ed tech, learning networks, and also books about DIY/school alternatives.  You can check them out here.

TT: Why did you initially decide to become a teacher?
KS: As much as my high school guidance counselor told me I should be an engineer (since there were no teaching jobs open back then and I was really good in math and science), I loved school so much and had such great teachers along the way, that I wanted to have the chance to teach others.

TT: How did you move from being a classroom teacher to being a consultant/writer?
KS: After undergrad, I attended library school and became a school library media specialist, mostly at the middle school level. Being one that had an early introduction to computers in high school with an IBM 360 when I was a freshman, and loved it, technology grew up as I was growing up and I became passionate about it.
 
As a librarian, I understood, ever before the Web was available, that access to information was wonderful, and I began to collect Gopher (pre-Web) sites and then World Wide Web sites, keeping the list of them organized in a recipe box. When an Internet service provider started up on Cape Cod, he told me if I learned HTML, he would post my list of sites. That was in July of 1995. That December, the NEA Today newspaper highlighted my directory for educators and it quickly became very popular.
 
In 1999, I moved my site to the then brand-new Discovery Education site. I love to learn, and each year I studied some topic of interest to me and applicable for teachers, and developed new presentations. Because of these topics, and my name recognition from the site, I was asked to present at conferences. I did that for many years while working in the schools, but retired from teaching at the K-12 level in 2011 and now teach graduate level courses for the Wilkes Discovery Master’s program at Wilkes University (PA) and work as an educational technologist full-time-- speaking, presenting, and training all over the world.

TT: How have you gained your following on social media do you think? Top tips?
KS: I like to think that I have gained my following on social media by providing my followers with items of interest for both their own professional development and for teaching and learning. I cull my followers, blocking those that don’t fit my idea of my audience of educators, so I pretty much always know who I am “talking” to.
 
One great tip is to look at the lists of those who you follow on Twitter. If you frequently receive great information from someone, take a look at who they follow and follow some of those educators. In addition, on Twitter, users can create lists of Twitter-users and not actually follow them. However, when you click on their profile in the online Twitter app, you will see a link for “lists”. You can view their lists and chose to “subscribe,” which adds their list to your lists. I use this feature when I want to learn more about a topic. For instance, I subscribe to a list created by a great administrator, and the conversation of those on that list helps guide me as I prepare and teach new things.

TT: Why do you think it is important to grow as a teacher / share your ideas with others?
KS: I truly believe in the “pay it forward” way of thinking. If you are taking ideas from other educators, and using them in a way that is applicable to your class or your content area, you should share out how that went. It can simply be a quick blog post with a link to that post posted in Twitter, Google+, a wiki, or Pinterest. If you don’t like criticism, then turn off commenting. Commenting on a blog post does richen the post, but if you are not soliciting feedback, and are just sharing, then there is no harm in turning off comments for those posts.

TT: Which are the top 3-5 pieces of work you'd like us to share in this blog and why? 
KS: The first two of pieces of work that I would like to share are my main Web sites: Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Everything and iPads4Teaching. The Guide to Everything site contains support pages for the presentations I give and have given in the recent past. Even when I stop sharing a presentation, I do add new items to the pages. I retire the pages when I feel they are no longer applicable for others. The iPads4Teaching page contains tons of iPad-related materials broken out by areas such as collaboration, creation, classroom workflow, and others.
 
My personal blog, Kathy Schrock’s Kaffeeklatsch contains reviews of items and some rants by me, and is more eclectic in nature. My current blog for Discovery Education, Kathy Schrock’s Katch of the Month, is more pedagogical. For instance, I just completed a series on student literacies for the digital age and one on higher-order thinking skills and Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy.
 
If you want to keep up with items I discover daily, you might want to follow me on Twitter. I won’t promise that everything will be educational in nature, but about 95% is and the other 5% allows you to get to know me a bit better!