Journal 7: My Personal Learning Network

NETS-T: 5


1.  My Personal Learning Network (PLN) is a way to stay connected amongst colleagues with the same interests as myself.  This is a great resource for a future teacher because it's a way to discuss new lesson plans, teaching techniques, and network other career related skills. 

2.  I use Twitter to follow educational tweets that will pertain to teachers.  I am following: usedgov (the U.S. Department of Education), Education Week (an educational newspaper), Teach For America (a national corps for new teachers who teach for two years in rural/urban schools), Ideas_Factory (a UK Primary School Deputy Head with lots of ideas for teaching children from a different cultural standpoint), and We Are Teachers (online community for all teachers). 
     I decided to follow the chat #ntchat (new teacher chat) on Friday May 6, 2011 at 5pm.  It was interesting to participate in this chat because it seemed like a very positive and supportive network of new teachers.  Most of the chatting involved hints to de-stress/stay charged towards the end of the year and thanking mom's for Mother's Day.  Also, the chat directed me towards some interesting educational sites such as edutopia.com.

3.  I use Diigo as a networking tool because it is a quick way to search and stay connected to interesting educational sites.  I first bookmarked Edutopia's facebook page to my Diigo account.  On this site, there were many links to educational blogs and articles plus a way for me to communicate with other teachers.
     Next, I bookmarked an educational wiki from New Zealand called 21st Century Learning.  In this wiki site, a New Zealand teacher of 12 years discusses his technological advances and sometimes disappointments in the classroom.  I think this is an interesting site to follow because it can give me a different cultural perspective on technology in the classroom somewhere across the world.
     Then, I bookmarked a blog from Education Next.  This is a site about current events that affect teachers.  One of the blog topics was about the increase in technology in the classroom.  The blog stated that
4 million K-12 students took some sort of online course this last year.  This is a good site to network with because they are very up to date with the current events in the teaching career.

4.  I joined the discussion forum "iPads in the elementary classroom" on the website edupln.com (Educators PLN).  This discussion caught my attention because I would love to find out how to go about getting iPads, or any other new technology, in my future classroom.  I watched the video called Best Practices in Social Networking for Educators.  It is an interview with a principal from New Jersey that used to be completely anti-social networking, but is now referred to as "Mr. Twitter."  In the video, Eric Sheninger discusses how his misconceptions about social network sites like Twitter made him think they were useless tools for educators or students.  Once he gave Twitter a shot, he realized that he could connect with an endless amount of resources to keep him up to date with the 21st century technology being used by his students.  He suggests that principals and educators "stick their toes in the water" to figure out what the newest social media is really all about.  Mr. Sheninger says that by implementing the newest technology in his school, students are excited to come to school. 
     This is important to me because it reminds me that it will be my job as a teacher to be on top of the latest technological opportunities and how they affect my students for the better or worse.  I was just like Principal Sheninger, I thought Twitter was a useless social site where people discussed what they were eating for dinner.  Now that I've been coaxed into opening an account and to explore it, I see that my first impression was incorrect and it can be used as an important tool and resource.