My Personal Learning Network or PLN is important because it allows me to collaborate with other educators and continue learning about emerging theories in education. A PLN is a collection of social media networks in which you can connect with people who share similar interests and collaborate with one another about ideas, educational resources, and helpful on line links. It is therefore very important as a classroom teacher to establish a PLN as it connects you to others around the world and allows you to stay up to date with emerging technological advances and educational practices.
Twitter is a great addition to a professional PLN. Many people see this site as a gossip and social media site but many people use this site for educational purposes. Twitter offers insight to new teachers and gives advice and feedback to educators worldwide. This site can be used as a collaborative tool. On my twitter page, I only follow my fellow classmates and use their posts in order to fulfill requirements for my education classes. Classmates can collaborate on shared interests. I have used this site to listen in on educational chats that have to do with math since I am planning on being a math teacher. These online chat sessions in which educators world wide meet to communicate about a specific topic during a specific time period in this virtual reality. I participated in @mathchat on twitter on May 2nd. The topic of this chat was “how do we get students to dig deeper?” During this chat I witnessed educators come up with ways to keep kids from saying “I’m finished.” Educators believe that all people including students have more math intuition then they realize. I got a couple great ideas from the chat that is similar to what we have done in class. Blogs with top tips for teaching math is a great idea to getting students to dig deeper. The chat was hard to follow. There were so many tweets at such a rapid pace however, I did come out of the chat feeling inspired and motivated to push social media on educators and proving its benefits as an educational tool.
Derogative
Diigo is another great tool for educators! It organizes your online material and resources and saves you from having to search creditable information. The site allows you to bookmark pages and sites and then uses key words to tag specific information or topics of discussion. Through these tags, educators are able to find other sites and sources that pertain to information that other educators have already tagged as useful and valuable. In my Diigo account I selected my online material by looking for fellow ed422 tags. From there I was able to explore other Diigo pages of my fellow classmates and use their information to build my own account. I was even able to use Diigo to research my chat for my PLN!
By becoming a member of Classroom 2.0 I was able to link up with educators that were interested in my same depth of study. Classroom 2.0 is a social media site for educators that are interested in web 2.0. The site provides articles; videos, live chats and blogs that pertain to the subject you wish to teach. This site allows you to create your own blog and follow fellow educators. I found the shared experiences were very beneficial to me as I used them to experience first hand what I need to do in order to successfully incorporate technology in my classroom.
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