Journal 7: Insight on PLNs

A Personal Learning Network, abbreviated PLN, is a virtual community of individuals who network to find and share information with one another, often through social mediums, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Diigo, Reddit, to name a few. Most of the time, the individuals sharing information do not know another, nor will they ever meet, except online. As a future teacher, developing a PLN not only allows me to network with potential employers, schools, and potential colleagues, but also to keep up with the latest news in education via the net. My PLN community will provide me with valuable resources, discussions, and insight that a textbook or university course simply cannot keep up with.

Although I was required to sign up for a Twitter account for this course, and while I initially went on feeling reluctant, I have since come to appreciate what twitter is about and how I can personally use it to connect with others. I see and realize that Twitter is a valuable resource for me to "tweet," meaning post a message to share with others, links and articles I have found online. It seems natural for me to share information and has become less of a bother and instead easy. I really enjoy reading what others tweet as well, and with the expansion of the people I follow, I feel as though I am keeping up with what is important in the different spheres and circles I am apart of. One such circle has developed through my participation in a TweetChat. I participated in the 9am PST TweetChat on March 27, 2012. The topic was "What are the possibilities that open to us if we change observation models for teachers to a coaching model?" From this chat, I was able to think about how teachers are observed by their bosses. I realized that even amongst educators, there is a wide range of opinions. One point that was made (I forgot who made this point) that I found to be interesting was that when teachers know they are going to be observed, how often do they teach to the form? Teachers nowadays are quick to say they do not like teaching to the test, yet they perform to how they are going to be evaluated. I really enjoyed participating in this discussion (I even made a few comments, and my professor was on at the same time I was),and I see myself using this feature more in the future. I went ahead and added about a dozen educators and administrators from Vancouver, Kansas, Washington, to name a few. I chose these educators to follow because they actively participated in the discussion and brought up salient points and questions. I also realized that once I chose to "follow" them, they were all following each other.

I joined Diigo, and I am a huge fan. I use it not just for this class, but also for my own personal bookmarks. I currently tutor for AVID, as well as privately for a few students, and I use Diigo as a resource to bookmark pages that are helpful for me to be able to help my students. I like the idea that I can just turn to Diigo for a web link, rather than doing a generic Google search and hoping that a credible, valuable website pops up. I have begun to follow people, most of whom are educators. I found many of these people by searching for topics that I have tagged, and then seeing who has contributed articles. I then would go into each profile, see what articles that one contributor has tagged, and see what they do, and then decide to follow them. I also searched for educators I follow on Twitter, and have added some of those people too. As for the articles I have tagged PLN, many of them come from an education website, including "edupln" and "edtopia." I have included these sites and articles because I know them to contain reliable information.

I joined the Educators PLN. I thought it to be a valuable resource and a site with diverse topics and communities. Stumbling upon the forum, I came across multiple discussions. One stuck out to me. The discussion I found interesting was titled "how to keep students engaged in your online class." I found this interesting because the students they are speaking of are in a high school AP Literature class, and it is being offered online. I took AP Lit in high school, and I cannot imagine doing the work online; interaction with others was always a major component of the class and understanding. The teachers said they gave students a large time frame to complete the assignments, and it sounded as if they gave the students minimal work that was test prep for the AP test in May. Another teacher said that journals often were more thoroughly completed, because they are personal between the teacher and student. I also looked into blogposts, and I came across one titled "Take Note." It was about the various notetaking apps for tablets that are currently in the cyberworld. I was amazed at the number of programs;I thought only a few would dominate.