A Personal Learning Network, or PLN, is a connection of
people who learn from one another and share a wealth of knowledge with one
another. Through the use of Twitter,
Diigo, and Classroom 2.0 I have been able to make connections with other
students and educators who share similar personal and professional goals. As a teacher I will benefit from having a PLN
because I will get resources, ideas and feedback from the members of my PLN
that will help me grow and mature in my career.
To get a start on building my PLN I became a member of
Twitter. On Twitter I have set up a
Hootsuit deck that allows me to have multiple columns to follow different
streams. I have been able to follow my
home stream, edchat and mathchat. Some of the people I'm following include David Craig, Jill Thompson, Jennifer Harden, Julie Hill Reulbach, and Laura Laing. By folowing these people and hashtags I can get resources and see ideas posted by the people who tweet in these
streams. I am currently following a
number of my classmates, my professor, and some of the participants from a
mathchat discussion.
On Thursday, July 28 at 5pm I participated in the mathchat
discussion. The subject was “how do I stimulate students
seeing connections in math?” Luckily I
used Tweetchat to view the chat because the experience was very fast paced. There were some good thoughts, and it was
cool to have so many different people involved at the same time from all over
the world. Some of the ideas included
applying math to real life, bringing in guest speakers, and leading students to
connections.
Diigo is another great networking tool. It allows you to see sites that other people
have bookmarked. So, if you follow
people on Diigo who are interested in the same educational things that you are,
then you can benefit from the sites they bookmark and use them as
resources. I found five people to follow
on Diigo, Erin Remple, Lesley Reilly, Karen Soohy, and Mariln Western. I searched the community for
subjects such as math, education, lessons, technology and PLN. By doing this I was able to find Diigo
members who bookmarked valuable sites related to things I am interested in, and
I now follow these people. I tagged
three sites under PLN. First I tagged a
site that discussed the steps of building your PLN. Then I tagged a site that further described
how to develop your PLN. The last site I
tagged PLN discussed ways to find good teachers to follow in Twitter. These sites will help me grow my PLN and
benefit more from my PLN.
In addition to Twitter and Diigo, I became a member
of Classroom 2.0, a social network for educators, and those interested in
education. While on Classroom 2.0 I watched a video
called “Rockin’ Rhombus.” In this video
a man walks around and asks a handful of people, mostly adults, three
questions. He asked for the definitions
of a rhombus, and isosceles triangle and a trapezoid. None of the people knew the correct answer
and these were third and fourth grade standards. This was astounding to me. These adults had forgotten things so
easily. It makes me realize that it
takes something special to get students to retain information, and as the video
suggested, songs help students retain things.
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