Technology is helping educators teach beyond basic materials such as books and overheads, it allows us to engage all students in a way that works best for them. The benefits of technology are not only seen by students but teachers as well. Teachers have the ability to retrieve resources from all types of outlets found on the web through their PLN or personal learning network. A PLN is a system of connecting people around the globe, where we can share ideas, post useful resources, and learn on another.
I created my PLN using the following tools:
Twitter: Twitter is an online social network and micro-blogging service that allows users to send small burst of information called "tweets". I mainly use my Twitter account as a way for me to learn from other educators who have extensive knowledge and experience in the field of education. To help streamline tweets and newsfeeds, I downloaded TweetDeck onto my computer. TweetDeck is an application that organizes all the different streams into columns. It allows me to manage my professional and personal streams in one central location. I use Twitter to follow educators such as Eric Sheniger, Steve Reifman, Aiden Levy, Lisa Dabbs, and Tom Whitby. I chose to follow many educators from different fields because I feel it allows me to learn about education from all perspectives. For example, Tom Whitby is a professor at St. Josephs in New York with over 34 years of teaching experience. Eric Sheninger is a principal and an author. Aiden Levy is a fairly new teacher with 6 years of experience. I chose to follow Aiden specifically because I believe he has been teaching for a small amount of time but still has lots of room for growth. By following him, I can learn from his tweets and and see what it is like to be a new teacher.
I also chose to follow educational streams such as #edchat and #ntchat. Through streams like these, I can follow multiple tweets that pertains to a certain subject. on March 28 2012, at 5pm, I participated in the new teachers stream. The topic was, "How is Coaching and Mentoring helpful?" I used TweetDeck to follow the stream and learned several things about coaching and mentoring. Someone made a good point in the chat, between the mentee(new teacher) and coach (veteran teacher), and that the relationship between the two should be reciprocal. New teachers should have full support from their coach and learn from them. Coaches should be able to listen, understand, and learn from their mentee. Both teachers should be able to learn, transform and modify each others teaching style and continue to grow as a teacher.
Diigo: Diigo is a social bookmarking service that allows users to bookmark web sites, highlight notes in the reading, and highlight directly on the web page as if it was a real book! By tagging each bookmark with a hastag, the Diigo community can follow specific "tags" and read what others have found. Diigo is a useful tool in building my PLN because it has allows me to bookmark anything on the web and read it at my convenience and retrieve information with ease using my Diigo sidebar or other internet connected device.
Using Diigo to build my PLN, I chose to follow John Evans, Crista Anderson, Beth Harvey and several other educators because I feel they all have experience and useful information that I can use. Crista Anderson is a fifth grade teacher who is always searching for innovative ways to engage students. When I was browsing her library, I found one of her bookmarks titled, "Teaching and Modeling Good Digital Citizenship". This article shared information about organizations such as iEarn, an non-profit org empowering millions of teachers and youth around the world to learn, communicate, and work on projects together. Bookmarking articles, blogs, and websites related to education on a regular basis is important as well. By taking a couple hours out of the week, to add and expand my PLN will only help me become a better teacher. A site I tagged "PLN" on Diigo is a blog called, Tech Savvy Ed Blogger. Ben Rimes, a technology coordinator is the author of this amazing blog! His posts are fun to read, and helpful because most of his them are geared towards integrating technology in the classroom. Ben's posts ranges from art, mathematics, history to advocacy. One of Ben's posts was titled, "When People Make Public Mistakes" and it was a great example of how PLNs can resourceful among educators across the nation. In the post, Ben shares his tweets between educators and admins receiving real-time support and assistance.
Educators Discussion Forums: I am also a member of two educational learning networks, Classroom 2.0 and The Educator's PLN. Both of these sites are for educators to add to their PLN. On both of these sites, you can find resources such as articles, videos, and blogs. When I was exploring the The Educator's PLN site, I stumbled across a discussion about the importance of reflecting as a teacher. Sandra keeps a professional journal and reflects about all the positive events that has happened. I responded to her post, about the importance of reflecting regularly as a student and future educator. Click here to View the Discussion Forum.
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