My Personal Learning Network

My Personalized Learning Network is the start to an interactive group of teachers that I selected and will keep selecting according to my specialized needs and interests: Science, high school teaching, and everything around that. It is a support system for me, and allows me to continually grow professionally, in accordance with NETS-T No. 5.

My PLN consists of RSS feeds that I access through Feedly, of a Diigo library for social bookmarking, a TWITTER account, a Classroom 2.0 membership, this blog that I maintain on google blogspot, and my facebook site. 

I have subscribed to several sites on RSS (really simple syndication or rich site summary) and access this information through Feedly (http://feedly.com). If I go into my Feedly app, I automatically see news from the sites “npr Education”, TED Education, and TED talks. These sites are in my education folder and provide me with constant insight, it is a very neat general education update. I also subscribed to NYT science, and sorted that feed into my science folder. I added to 2 podcasts, Education Week (focus on High School), and NYT Education. I will keep expanding my followings.

A good starting point to my PLN was my Twitter account. On Twitter, I am following several educational sites, as well as sites highlighting science or my personal interests: National Science Foundation, National Geographic, Smithonian, Science News, Discovery, and more. I also follow TED talk and Ted Education, as already mentioned. I will add more personal sites, so far I am following high school principal Mark Burlington. Through the hashtag #422su14 I can tweet with my 422 course fellows. I have not yet investigated more interesting persons from the education community to follow, I am hoping this will come naturally as I get further into my credential program and teaching education. My main interests so far are science related sites. I have not tweeted much, as I feel I do not have to say too much as of now, and want to tweet only significant content.

Another part of my PLN is my blog under http://astridlaido.blogspot.com. I am blogging about news from the ISTE magazine about technology in the classroom. I also comment on my fellow course participants’ blogs to this theme, so the exchange and learning is mutual. I plan to extend this blog to other education topics as my training in this area moves forward. 

One of my favorites on the Web 2.0 is my Diigo library. This is a social bookmarking site where I store and sort information I found on the web, and share it with colleagues. I am sorting my findings in several lists, to distinguish education related, science related, and personal interest finds. With Diigo I can highlight, post notes, and add tags to easily find resources in my or other colleagues’ libraries. This is a great collaboration tool. In searching for a social justice related theme together with fellow course 422 members, I realized how we found many articles relating to the same theme, that I did not detect myself.

In order to accelerate my professionalism and learn more from fellow teachers, I joined Classroom 2.0. This is a network of teachers who can post questions and share information. It is quite overwhelming at first, so I joined the group “Classroom 2.0 for beginners” to find my way in. Host Sue Walters offers advice on elements of the web 2.0 in form of webinars and personal communication. Diving further into it required me to sign up for new pages, edublog and Classroom 2.0 live. I also found several teachers offering lesson plans and ideas for using teaching unconventional teaching material. I established my own site, invited a couple teacher friends, and would love to download my badge if just my defective computer would let me (I only get a “blocked plug-in” notice picture and an embed code http://static.ning.com/socialnetworkmain/widgets/index/swf/badge.swf?xn_version=124632088). I posted a question about that but have not received an answer so far. 

The only web 2.0 tool that I used before the 422 class, was facebook. This is mainly a tool to interact with friends, but is also my interface with my EnCorps STEM teacher organization that I belong to, as well as a messaging board for fellow teachers within this group.

The possibilities for a PLN are unlimited. I am only at the starting point, and it is very exciting. My PLN will help me find and filter information tailored to my very own needs and interests. My best access seems to be Twitter. I can easily sign up to follow all kinds of sites relating to my interests and to education. It will take much more time to fully explore and develop my personal learning network. I will use my upcoming credential program year to develop contacts, filter out the sites just right for me, and become an actively participating member taking full advantage of the interactive learning and teaching community, to develop myself and provide my insights as well.