1. PLN stands for Personal Learning Network. This refers to the network of online and other tools that you collect in order to increase your knowledge of the educational profession. These may include sites like Twitter that allow quick and easy communication, blogs, educational websites, and other professional resources. The point of a PLN is to create a community of individuals who share similar interests/needs so that you can learn from them and share the things that you have learned in return. A PLN can be a great asset for a teacher because it allows you to quickly and easily find materials and ideas for lessons from other teachers, ask others about professional concerns, stay connected with fellow educators, and be aware of current educational topics.
2. I was introduced to Twitter as a means to communicate with other educational professionals via messages that are short and to the point. This way I am able to view a variety of resources and websites posted by others in the educational community quickly, and pick out any that catch my interest. I am able to also share the resources that I have found to be helpful with others. By participating in a Twitter chat, I am able to view what other teachers think or know about a topic that interests me, share my own knowledge, and ask questions that will be responded to promptly. I participated in an #edchat discussion on 4/12 at 4:00 pm. This is an all day chat, so there is no specific discussion topic. It is more a place for people to drop helpful hints, share and make comments on recent educational news, and ask questions. It was a great way to see people in the education community interacting. One teacher even posted that her class would be doing a poetry reading at the end of the month and wanted to know if anyone was interested in skyping with the class for a reading. There were also several posts with links to some great math resources like a lesson plan that uses musical notes to teach fractions and other worksheets.
3. Diigo is also a useful PLN tool that allows you to bookmark interesting web pages and tag them with appropriate search terms so that they are fast and easy to find later. This is a great way to hold on to professional resource that you may want to use at a later date and it is also a great way to share your resources with other professionals in your PLN. You can either Tweet links to the sites in your Diigo library or simply let others find them by searching tags on the Diigo site so that they can see what you and other people have saved to your libraries. Another useful feature of Diigo is the ability to create a network similar to the way that you create one in Twitter; simply click on the name of someone you are interested in and then click "follow". This puts that person in your "My Network" page and allows you to view the things they have stored in their libraries. I currently have five people that I am following on Diigo: Martha T., Greg N., Lori A., Caroline B., and David W.. I chose to follow these individuals because they are all current teachers and have a number of useful teaching resources saved to their libraries that I am now able to access. These include ideas for using technology to aid student learning, lesson plans on math and writing, and even a site that provides a free plagiarism detector for teachers.
4. The digital discussion forum that I chose to join was The Educator's PLN. I decided to join this forum because it offers a ready-made PLN. The site includes great professional resources like videos, forums on different topics, blog posts from members and links to their entire blog, and a link to edchat that shows what discussions are currently being held on Twitter so that you can sign in and join the discussion if you are interested in the current topic. I also explored a blog by member Benjamin Darr, a teacher from Missouri. This particular blog post was titled "Language Arts and the Internet". It was a really interesting piece siting a few of the ways that the internet has affected the way that kids learn language arts and offered some great suggestions on how to use common internet technologies in the classroom to increase student understanding of important language arts concepts. For example, Mr. Darr recommends having students use hyperlinks in order to underline the way that language arts concepts are interconnected. And also making the connection for students between how posting on social networks like facebook is similar to good note-taking practices: the goal of both is to write a brief but comprehensive summary of what is going on.
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