Establishing Professional Contacts and Expanding Resources

This week starts a new course in my journey On the Road to Mastery.  The course is entitled Issues and Trends in Early Childhood Education.  Throughout the next 8 weeks I will be corresponding with Early Childhood Professionals in other countries besides the United States.  In order to complete this assignment, I have to reach out to others and make new friends.  This is something that I love to do, so I am really excited about this.  Therefore this page is entitle "Establishing Professional Contacts and Expanding Resources"

Establishing Professional Contacts

I chose to contact my friends in my established social connections.  I have asked moderators of several Yahoo groups that I have been a member of over 8 years to allow me to post for my connections, I sent out a status update on Facebook because I have a lot of International friends, and I sent messages to webmasters of some organizations that I receive their newsletters about Early Childhood education.  Yahoo has some great groups that any educator can join.  I have received and shared many activities for various themes from these groups.

I have made contact with a Facebook friend that lives in the United Kingdom and works at a child care facility.  She and her co-workers will be corresponding with me over the next few weeks.  I have made preliminary contact with other professionals that have responded but we have not made the proper agreement as of yet.

Expanding Resources

This part of the blog assignment is to look at additional websites and make contact with them by joining their newsletter distribution.  I will also be commenting on what these sites are doing for children, parents, and the community surrounding issues with Early Childhood Education.  This week I have viewed two websites that I plan to add to my list of resources and will be receiving their newsletters.  The first is the National Black Child Institute (http://nbcdi.org/).  I chose this site to be informed about issues and trends affecting African American children as a whole.  The site also has great African American history facts that I was not aware of-so my knowledge is expanding on my history as well.

The second website is the Early Childhood Australia: The Australian Early Childhood Advocacy Organization. (http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/).  I chose this site so that I will have an International Resource that will provide me additional information about Early Childhood policies, issues, and trends in another country.

I look forward to sharing my experiences on this page of my blog over the next 8 weeks.  Thanks for reading and sharing comments as I travel on my road to mastery.