What is your PLN and how will it help you as a classroom teacher?
My personal learning network is made up of friends, family members, educators and other knowledgeable sources that keep me connected with our ever changing world. My PLN consists of Twitter, Facebook, Diigo, Skype, Google Docs, Igoogle and many more. Having a personal learning network has given me the opportunity to collaborate with other individuals to feed me ideas and resources that will further advance my practices as a future educator.
Discuss your use of Twitter, who is in your network and why? Reflect on your participation in an educational chat.
My use of Twitter is still pretty minimal, but I do try to get on more often. I had joined Twitter one time before and wasn't a big fan, but this time around, knowing how to navigate around a little better and what to look for, I feel like I appreciate this PLN more. My account consists of a couple of my peers in class, my teacher and many other educational pages that I found off of my professors twitter :o) as well as a few pages that I added for fun. I feel that Twitter is an ongoing service that can really help a future educator like me find valuable information that will enable be to become a more knowledgeable educator.
To be completely honest, I hadn't been able to get on a chat until this last Wednesday night April 20th when I joined the #ntchat about how to fund libraries in schools. I found the actual chat to be pretty interesting with quite a few people joining in, but I hope to find another topic in a chat that I may be able to connect with a little bit better further down the road.
Dicuss your use of Diigo as a networking tool. Explain what you tagged PLN and why?
Diigo has become very valuable to me for educational purposes. As a networking tool, Diigo had given me many educational resources to work with and gain more information from. I like Diigo a little bit more than Twitter because its a little easier for me to navigate. All of the different articles and shared facts between teachers and future educators has been very helpful, and is why I tagged certain pages as PLN. The pages that I thought I was really learning from, I chose to tag Personal Learning Network!I have the opportunity to gain knowledge from people that have been working with and around students for many years and I love that. As a future educator, it is vital to be able to find as many instrumental resources as possible to assist you on your way to becoming a better teacher.
Discuss which digital discussion forum you joined, add the badge to your blog, and reflect on the blog post, video, or article you explored.
I watched a video from Classroom 2.0 called "Tuned Out" by Karen Hume. She discussed how there is a large gap in today's society between the outside world and what goes on inside the classroom. She really focuses in on keeping the students engaged and how to do that. Her 5 principals are: Competence, Creativity, Community, Context and Challenge. She believes that with all 5 of those things, that students will stay excited about learning and school and teachers will continue to be motivated.
While watching the video, there were a few statistics that absolutely amazed me, one was the 94-99% of kids play video games and another was that more than have of children that are 12 years old own a cell phone. Its crazy how much has changed since I was that age. Growing up my parents were really strict on how much we watched TV and played video games. They encouraged us to play outside or on a sports team, so I never really got in to playing them. In my opinion I think that some times having all of this technology is too much. Are we ever going to be able to keep our students engaged when there are always newer more entertaining things on the market? Its one thing that makes me nervous as a future teacher, not being able to keep my students engaged.
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