Eddy Award Nominees

It's that time again--the Eddy Awards for outstanding achievement in educational social media (could there be a set of awards that are more worthwhile?).  I work with the Connected Educators initiative, and I know we'll be promoting the Eddys and urging our members, viewers, and readers to vote for all the nominees who helped us with our project's work, including Connected Educator Month.  And normally, just to be fair to everyone, I wouldn't be doing any nominatin', because we try to support everyone and not play favorites.

But I'm making an exception on behalf of someone, Powerful Learning Practice's Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, because I don't think there's anyone who sacrificed more to help us make CEM 2013 a success, let alone as a key member of our leadership team, so I want to make sure that her group's work, worthy in its own right, is nominated for this year's awards, in case no one has already done it.

Best Group Blog and Best Ed Tech/Resource Sharing Blog

Powerful Learning Practice's Voices From The Learning Revolution blog -- http://plpnetwork.com/voices/.  There are several things I love about this blog--it's such a rich variety of voices and perspectives, always full of great ideas, but I think what I most appreciate about it is the process by which it's being created, which I think is a harbinger of what's to come for the medium as a whole.  There's no marketing--everything is word of mouth--and all posts are written by PLP "peeps"  But more to the point, and the reason this is possible, is that editor John Norton (an online community legend dating back to his CTQ days) works directly with every blog author to develop their writing skills and pitch their stories to other media.  Furthermore, PLP puts its money where its virtual mouth is by paying teachers per post to help develop themselves as syndicated columnists and get their stories as connected educators fully told and out there for others to appreciate.

The revolution that Sue Waters and Edublogs started by providing the Edublogs platform and so many engaging tools and activities (like the challenges that have been part of the last two CEMs [and no, I'm not naive, long before then too!]) Sheryl, John, and the PLP team are building on in increasingly profound ways.

Best Twitter hashtag 

#plpnetwork -- There are a ton of great educational Twitter hashtags, as everyone knows (educators have been huge drivers of Twitter in general--14 million+ around the world participated in this year's CEM), and not enough of them are getting the love they deserve.  PLP's founders and peeps are always questing to push the envelope, and as a result the hashtag is full of innovation and ideas, including updates from the many action research projects educators undertake as groups in the field each year (as part of PLP's flagship PD program), and special events throughout the year.  But PLP is also about support, fun, engagement, and love, and there's a lot of that, too, in the steady stream of tweets from this very active tag.