ETEC 522 gives me the opportunity to expand my network to areas that are significantly different from where I work and live.

I know there is also someone in our class that is in Russia, I can't wait to see what she/he has to say about the school system in that country.

funded by the Department of Canadian Heritage. There are 85

Anglophones working as language monitors here in Quebec, and 200 Francophones working in other provinces. Teaching experience, while helpful, is not a pre-requisite to the job. As such, there is a range of backgrounds and a variety of perspectives for successful engagements with students. Our group of monitors stays connected and engaged to each other and to our student populations, concurrently as educators sharing our relative Canadian culture and English language, and as students learning how to bring relevance of our shared, cross-cultural  experiences, our myriad of regional and/or cultural knowledge, and real-world reasons for bilingualism even within the boundaries of our diverse Canadian landscape.

My connected learning is hampered in large part by the internet over here. The longer I stay in China, the more disconnected from the world I feel as I forget the Western internet. With so much of life happening on-line, I worry for the students we send to western universities without a western understanding of the virtual world. We try to incorporate connected technologies where we can but the major players are all blocked or access is painful.

For one workplace training activity, I had learners bring up their schedules on their smartphones, access emails in the past week that resulted in changes to their schedules in order to see how much their schedules change, create awareness of how they spend their time and develop techniques on how they can manage it more effectively. As a fun activity, I also had them count how often during the session they check their phone.

Most workplace bridging programs frequently bring in industry professionals to teach, review work, or provide opportunities to network, connecting learning to real-world performance. So in other words, I see a lot of connected learning everyday.

In my Kindergarten class, one group of two students discovered a loophole in my ‘two students per centre’ rule. The group was at the kitchen center, pretending that it was a restaurant kitchen instead of a house kitchen. The two students then went around the classroom inviting their peers to their restaurant and telling them to buy their food. Before I knew what was going on, there were five students at the kitchen center. Of course, I questioned the students about my rule. They told me about what they were doing and they wanted to also invite students from the other Kindergarten class to their restaurant. I was pleasantly shocked and pleased. It was an awesome learning moment for me!