PLN

Personal Learning Network

A Personal Learning Network (PLN) is a combination of a variety education applications and technologies that allow both teachers and students to have constant accessibility to each other and to class content.  A PLN allows students to better communicate as they can respond and give feedback to their peers through blogs, twitter accounts, forums, etc.  As a teacher, I will use a PLN in many of the same ways we have used a PLN in this 422 course.  I plan on having a class blog where students and parents have access to the class 24/7.  I also believe that a course module, like our Cougar Courses, is very effective in that it allows students to communicate in a protected forum about what they are learning.  This will be very effective for me to use as an english teacher because students can then discuss reading assignments together and communicate about aspects of the plot.  Also, as a coach, I think the 30 Boxes application I researched will be a great way to keep players and parents on schedule at all times.

My use of RSS Feeds consisted mostly of subscribing to Education communities from online newspapers throughout the country, including the LA Times, NY Times, and The NY Post.  Subscribing to these features through newspapers gave me the ability to see what is happening in education in our country.  This is important, especially in the state of California as teaching jobs are at a premium.  Staying abreast of our country’s education news is certainly important as we near another election this November.

For Twitter, I chose to follow Susan Kerr Jenkins, who frequently posts about educational technology tips (one of her latest being 21 apps for digital age learning that she acquired at the ISTE 2012 Conference), EdTechTalk, a community of people that talk about educational technology, Education News, a discussion of education throughout the world, and finally the U.S. Department of Education, which has all the latest news regarding education for the U.S.   Having these people and organizations in my network allows me to stay at the forefront of ways to incorporate technology into the classroom.

My use of Diigo consisted mostly following my group members, Matt and Ryan, for our shared network, but I also found a vast amount of information for PLN’s when I searched it in the community network.  What I found was tremendous resources and guides for how to go about constructing my very own PLN.  From researching PLN’s on Diigo, I learned that PLN’s allow teachers who share the same passions anywhere in the world to connect their classrooms and allow students from different cultures to communicate and learn from each other.  Also, it is important that we as educators teach students that there is a lot to learn on Facebook and Twitter other than just for social means.  There are several ways that these social sites can be used to aide education, students just need to be made aware of these features.  

The article I read on The Educators PLN had to do with the importance of making sure teachers who implement technology into the classroom are fully trained.  This is crucial because if teachers are not properly trained, it can lead to faulty data that says a particular technology does not work in the classroom, when really it is just faulty teaching.  The author noted that teachers must not only be fully trained but confident and enthusiastic when they are implementing new technology in the classroom.  

Overall, my first experience with a PLN was outstanding.  I would say that there is really only one con with PLN’s, in that it does not allow for face to face communication, which is why the classroom will always be a fundamental part of education.  In this digital world, one of the biggest challenges going forward for educators will be to help their students develop their social skills in face to face settings because every year there is less and less of it.