A Personal Learning Network (PLN) is a way for a person to gain and spread knowledge through a form of interaction such as sharing resources and ideas for future professional growth. Studying to become an elementary school teacher, there is a lot that I can learn from more experienced teachers. Creating my own Personal Learning Network, I have been able to use connect with other educators and learn through their experiences and ideas. My PLN consists of Twitter, an online social networking service which enables members to follow, communicate and share ideas with others; Diigo, a social bookmarking website which organizes specific websites through tagging and grouping; and Educator's PLN, a personal learning network for educators.
Using Twitter, I am able to communicate with other future educators, current educators, and education groups. I follow all of my classmates as well as other educators such as CATeachersassoc, flourishingkids, teachingwthsoul, teachersnet, and Weareteachers. You can also follow specific hashtags which allows you to participate in chats of the specific topic. I was able to participate in a chat with #urbaned on October 30th at 6:00 PM to discuss the relationship with standardized testing. Most of the people involved in the chat were saying that they thought education needed to be more about passion in learning instead of pressure to learn. Many also said that they were happy their schools were "data informed rather than data driven". I understood that as being aware of the standards and requirements of teachers to cover specific material for testing, but they were not teaching solely to do well on those tests, but to teach their students to have passion for learning and motivate them to participate because they want to, not because they have to. The chat was very informational and it also gave me a good insight on how to veer away from teaching for testing, especially because teachers now have an increased workload from budget cuts. It gave me good ideas such as assigning the students to write two sentences after each lesson about how they can use the information they just learned in real life. This way, the students are recognizing the information is useful, and not only taught to be tested on. It seems to be a good reminder for everyone when the pressure to do well on tests is overwhelming. The chat was very beneficial and gave me good ideas for my future teaching profession.
Diigo is a very accessible resource for organizing certain websites to refer back to it in the future. It is done by simply downloading the Diigo toolbar and bookmarking websites! You also can give the website certain tags for an even easier way to locate specific websites. And, Diigo also allows you to follow other users and have access to search their bookmarks as well. In that way, it acts as an excellent PLN resource to collaborate with others in your field and share information. I currently follow 7 people including Vicki Davis, Shelly Terrell, and many others. I chose to follow these people because they are educators and bookmark interesting information that could benefit me and other educators. In my Diigo library, I have tagged 3 bookmarks as PLN. The first is an educational blogger who titled his blog "learning.now". His blog discussed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and talked about the pressures it gives the students as well as the teachers to perform well due to testing. Another bookmark that I tagged under PLN was entitled "School Matters". It talked about educational news, specifically Tennessee's charter schools testing and how most charters schools do not have accurate data. The last bookmark that I tagged was from an educational blogger named Joanne Jacobs. Her blog post was entitled "A Tale of Two Teacher Evaluations" and discussed a teacher, Marilyn Rhames, and her experience at a school with an inexperienced principal and the importance of having an effective principal to manage a school and its staff.
By tagging all three of my sources under "PLN", they will be accessible to other Diigo user educators that search for resources under PLN. I also can search for PLN tags and come across others' posts for my own knowledge, so it truly acts as a great connecting network.
In addition to Twitter and Diigo, I also use a personal learning network called Educator's PLN. It displays educational forums, blogs, and videos for members to watch to learn about educational news and resources. I watched a video called "Ipads in Classrooms on Long Island" because it interested me. The video discussed the benefits of using Ipads in classrooms, the educational benefits rather than the focusing on the popularity of the device. It said that the Ipads have more applications that can be very useful to students. For example, it showed the Ipad's ability to highlight text and add a note to that specific portion to refer back to. About the issue of costs to provide all classrooms with Ipads, they said it is less expensive than one would think because it takes away from other expenses such as photo copying, printing, and textbooks. It was interesting to see how useful and user-friendly the Ipad was, especially for students in a classroom. I wonder if this idea of using Ipads in class will spread throughout the world!
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