Personal Learning Network

Personal Learning Network

RSS Feeds: I learned about RSS feeds for the first time in our summer course. I have been familiar with blogs and other resource sites on the web, but have never used a RSS feed site to keep up on the news that I am interested in. During this class, I created an account with Feedly to follow my feeds, and subscribed to a few great educational resources. Some of the sites I have added to my Feedly account include MindShift (http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/), the Education Department News (http://www.ed.gov/), AppsInEducation (http://appsineducation.blogspot.com/), and TED Education http://www.youtube.com/user/TEDEducation). My favorite resource to follow on feedly has definitely been TED Education because I love watching the new videos that the site provides. The TED Ed feed has a lot of really great videos that cover a mass range of subject matter. Some of the videos and insight I find on Ted Ed are very interesting, but also cover subjects that I would never think to research. Ted Ed has become a great tool for brainstorming and finding new ideas for the classroom. The other feeds I follow in Feedly also provide very interesting and relevant info for teaching. I found the RSS feeds to be helpful to expand my knowledge of teaching strategies and tools. I know I will continue to follow these resources as I pursue my teaching career.

Twitter: Having started my college career in the focus of marketing and communications, I have been somewhat active on Twitter for some time. However, this summer I expanded my Twitter network to reach beyond entertainment news and friends. I now use my Twitter account to follow resources such as Teachers.net, Huffington Post Education, We Are Teachers, Scholastic Teachers, and Edutopia. Following these accounts has been helpful because it has led me to see what is current in the topic of education. I have found ideas for creative lesson plans, staff get-togethers, parent communication and others. So far I have followed discussion hashtags for #eduapps and #edtech. These discussion hashtags have helped me to find current conversations, ideas and findings about apps in education, or education technology. I have discovered great app tools, and strategies from following these discussions. As I begin my student teaching time, I plan to use twitter to research other topics as well. Since I have begun “tweeting” things about education I have not received any responses or correspondence to my posts, but I hope that as time goes by and my network expands I can begin to create conversations over twitter.

Diigo: Diigo is a site that is great for creating online bookmarks, highlighting websites and sharing resources with peers. I used Diigo earlier in the course to research education apps with my group. I found it to be a great tool to keep track of the useful sites I had found, and also a great way to share my sites with my group mates. With Diigo groups, my research group was able to form a private group that each of us could post our research findings to the group wall. After our assignment, I also found it helpful to search subject tags on diigo of topics I was interested in.

Ning – Classroom 2.0: For the Ning assignment I created an account on Classroom 2.0. This is  a great resource for teachers because it allows users to participate in forums, join special interest groups, view blogs, articles and more. Through Classroom 2.0 I found the blog post, “Strengths and Weaknesses of Online Learning”. http://www.teacherstechworkshop.com/2013/07/strengths-and-weaknesses-of-online.html. The post covered many ups and downs of online schooling and gave a great picture of stats related to online school. The authors stated his findings, provided graphs and charts on various percentages related to the subject, and also provided the resources for research. I though the blog post was very helpful, however, the content was not as relevant to me as a teacher as I was hoping it to be. I am glad that I was able to explore blogs, articles, forums and other resources through Classroom 2.0. I think this will be a valuable resource for me as a teacher.

Summary: I really enjoyed the PLN assignment in this course. Because of my marketing and communications background, I have spent a good deal of time in social media and networking sites. I had not used many of the sources that we were introduced to in this course though, and the PLN assignment was a great way for me to explore new resources and look into ways that I can grow my teacher influences. I think that some of the resources we used will help me more than others, and Classroom 2.0 and Twitter were my favorite. I think my PLN will help me as a future teacher because it has enabled me to expand my resources of teaching tips, tricks, methods and ideas.