A PLN is a personal
learning network. They are very valuable resources for communicating among
students or fellow teachers. Students can use them to transport documents, view
specific documents and reach out to various sites that provide educational opportunities,
and transfer documents and works for others to view. The personal learning
network that I was interested in is twitter. This PLN absolutely fascinates me
with the potential it has in the classroom. Hoping to become a future history
teacher, I see twitter as an avenue to enhance students’ knowledge and
excitement in the curriculum. PLN are very valuable for teachers. In an age in
education where budget cuts are limiting the tools that teachers need to teach
their students, PLN’s provide interesting paths for students to enhance their
knowledge in a subject area. Also teachers can provide much more insight in
using these tools. For instance, Diigo allows students and teachers to share
documents and possibly primary sources that would either be too hard to find or
cost too much to make a copy for every single student. PLN’s have provided so
much to the field of education.
A very valuable PLN is
the RSS feed. It allows for a person who has created a Blog to stream
information and news that pertains to a particular website that one is
interested in. On my educational blog I have RSS feeds to KPBS, History.net,
and the New York Times. As a future History teacher these three RSS feeds
provide a large amount of sources and information that will cover any standard
for California Social Science. I picked the world news RSS feed from the New
York Times which will allow me to present current events to my students. The KPBS
education RSS feed keeps me up to date on local news. The History.net RSS feed
allows for news in the History field which would be easy to relate in any of my
classes.
Twitter can also be a
very valuable source. You can follow famous people, historians, and historical
reviews or magazines. On top of this you receive information and links to
pictures, articles, and video feeds. I am following many of my fellow
classmates on twitter. But I also follow the KPBS twitter, the National Parks
Service twitter, and the History Channel twitter. They all provide wonderful
insight on a daily basis.
On Diigo I follow two
of my classmates Ryan Otterson and Rob James. They provide a ton of sources
that we shared on our Diigo library about “Ipads in the classroom” and the
implementation of Ipads as a technology in education. Diigo is a valuable
source because teacher can create groups online for their classes and give
their students access to various arrangements of sources. I found on the Diigo
website a source that talked about languages that are becoming endangered. I
found this to be very interesting.
I went on the ITSE site
and entered their digital discussion forum known as Ning. I looked at a blog
post from Suzie Boss who talks about bringing “technological innovation” into
the classroom. She included an interview via Skype which was very interesting
to see. She wanted to express “initiatives that encourage creativity, problem
solving, and grassroots innovation”. I thought this was a very informative PLN
and allows teachers to access forums and blogs on technology in the classroom.
I felt that looking at
all of these PLN’s was very enlightening. I have learned a lot in this class
that I didn’t know. I thought Twitter was just for following sports teams. I
never knew it had an application in modern education. My favorite PLNs would
have to be the RSS feed, Blogs, and Twitter. These are easy to use applications
and I see myself using them a lot in the classroom. I didn’t really like Diigo
because I just see students getting lost in the website. It is a great PLN I
just don’t think I will use it in my classroom. I could post the documents on
an internet blog and get the same effect form the students.
Links to:
My internet Blog where you can see my RSS feeds: http://rowla008.blogspot.com/
The Blog I looked at on Ning: http://iste2012.org/profiles/blogs/making-innovation-teachable?xg_source=activity
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