A Personal Learning Network, or PLN, can be defined as a person or community online who contributes positively to your knowledge and skill of your interest. In this case, and in this class, it would be education, technology and teaching. My PLN is a combination of things. My main focus, however, are on people that may help assist me while I grow as a teacher with similar teaching styles, beliefs, and ideas I see may be helpful in my future classroom. I used several tools in order to broaden my PLN including Twitter, Diigo, and Google Groups to name a few. I am loving Diigo!! I love that I can search for something in Diigo and choose by which method I would like to search, such as looking for different educators (special education, SLP, and technology in education) that suggest different links, tools and teaching methods. These things get my wheels churning and lead to different ideas that I may not have thoughts of otherwise.
- Going on the Speech Language Pathology path, I thought it would be beneficial to add several special education forums, as well as SLPs and SLPAs to get an idea of what kind of lessons they are presenting in their classroom today. I "Listened in" to Twitter Chat #Elemchat on Saturday, March 19th at 6pm PST, 9pm EST. This was quite the appropriate discussion forum. The subject of the chat was, "What is digital citizenship and how do we encourage and develop it in the elementary classroom?" I had no idea what digital citizenship was, and to be honest, they kept suggesting that they define it, but no one did so I had to take it upon myself. From what I understood, it is the teaching of technology in the classrooms and more importantly, getting other teachers, faculty, and parents to enourage the use of technology in the classroom. Many of the participants were discussing how they incorporated technology into their classroom with the help of students and their parents. Several of the teachers brought up a couple sites they were fond of, Twiducate.com and Edmodo.com. Intrigued, I decided to google these sites and found that they were very similar to what we use at CSUSM as our Moodle/Cougar Courses. These sites are for students to view assignments, calendars, communicate with classmates. However, these sites are also able to be viewed by parents and other teachers. Had I not participated in this chat, I am not sure I would have learned about these sites which I am already trying to think of how to incoroporate into my future class lesson plans. These teachers also mentioned the burden of the school district blocking and one teacher suggested they use Ning as their "venue", which I recognized as part of my PLN assignment.
- While using Diigo, I have already added 5 groups to my account. A few dealing with special education, one dealing specifically with speech language pathology, one on educaton in general and then one with technology in education. There were several education blogs that were presented to this class, and while I chose 5 to bookmark, I think the three that I am most likely to follow are: Cool Cat Teach Blog, This Week in Education, and Adventures in Educational Blogging. These ones seem more "bloggish" to me. I can tell they are real people and the blogs don't read as if they are articles. Real people, concerned about education as well as hopeful that their ideas may be implemented into classrooms.
- While I already belonged to Classroom 2.0, an article I found interesting was entitled, "Should teachers and students be 'friends' on social networking sites?" I think most people lean toward the side that says, "uh...no", and that is exactly where I stand. Social networking sites are for those to communicate with friends and be able to be themselves. Even in the article, one person suggests that if teachers become "friends" with their students, they should be prepared to wear their educator hats. To me, this is matter-of-fact, there should never be blurred lines, and teachers becoming friends with students is just inapproriate. The article tried to defend the action saying that perhaps this social networking site is a good form of communication from teacher to student, if the student has been missing from class and has an assignment due soon....e-mail them! I'm sorry, but in my opinion, it's not appropriate for a teacher to be a friend of a current student. End. Of. Discussion.
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