Historically, teaching has been a pretty solitary occupation. You have your classes and courses, your classroom, and you're on your own. In the past 5 to 7 years a number of prominent public education activists and non-profit organizations have been committed to changing that cultural and making collaboration and teams the norm, based on the simple premise that 'two heads are better than one' when trying to foster innovation and creativity.
So you may already be a "Connected Educator" and that's great. Hopefully, some of the resources here will be a useful add to your existing list. If not, consider it. Here's a commentary from Tom Whitby at Edutopia that makes a convincing case for why the investment in effort and change will pay big dividends. And speaking of Edutopia, this blog post on "Ten Tips to Become a Connected Educator" was posted last year, but it's still pretty relevant.
There are a ton of resources out there - blogs, community forums, and organizations - that can help, but here are a few I've seen that are particularly good. Connected Educators is a non-profit organization sponsoring a variety of online events and ASCD has listings of many online organizations. Powerful Learning Practice is a great blog to connect with and they just published an "Insider's Guide to Connected Educator Month - Week 1".
Twitter is probably the single most popular digital tool folks use to get "connected" and build communities of interest. If you're not a twitter user, it can seem rather intimidating at first. Here's a short YouTube video (a screencast made by a teacher) that gives you a great tutorial in about 10 minutes.
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