This activity involved Twitter, Delicious and Educators PLN which is a digital discussion forum. I actively participated in my twitter with a discussion and followed specific educational tweeters. Then I used delicious to create a network of users who tag and store specific educational websites. Last, I read up on a blog within the Ning of Educators PLN and reflected on what I learned.
Nets-T #5
Using Twitter and Delicious, I was able to create my personal learning network. Twitter is a social networking and microblogging site that let’s individuals answer, “What are you doing/thinking?” . Followers of my twitter receive my tweets when I text message a statement up to 140 characters, this creates for direct phrases. Twitter opens up a different avenue for communication, providing a place for quick collaboration and insight. Delicious is a social bookmarking cloud service that allows its users to store, share and find new websites. These websites are useful for all different groups of people, but specifically for educators. I believe that without sharing and teaming together, proficient learning cannot take place in our modern society.
On Twitter, I follow 4 times as many people than how many followers I have. I think that the main reason for this is because I don’t use Twitter to express my thoughts or days as much as I use it to consume new information from those who have been living life longer than me. My network consists of various music artists, authors, few personal friends, teachers like J.Heil and Greta Sandler, as well as collegechat and web2.0. I enjoy following communities like collegechat and web2.0 because I am able to relate with the information provided and talked about. Another inspiring person I follow is “Thanks2teachers”, used by Richard Lakin, an author of Teaching as an act of Love. He writes from Jerusalem, Israel which really provides many thoughtful articles from a different point of view, in a different part of the world.
I participated in an educational chat via (#elemchat) because I want to become an elementary school teacher one day. The topic discussed was about homework and it’s value or disvalue in education today. I liked this discussion because I thought that I was the only person who found homework inefficient and unnecessary for students. It wasn’t a chat like I was thinking, but more or less a place where people shared ideas using articles regarding what they believed about homework. It was actually kind of overwhelming because there were so many posts every second I could barely keep up. Afterwards I was able to go back and look through more of the articles! Through this discussion I “met” new people and now follow inspiring educators who will continue to add to my learning.
My delicious network consists of people like Bernie Dodge, JHeil, edtechtalk and sakruz. These people all tag educational and technology based websites that provide new and specific insight to ideas that can help a teacher, student and parent. Some websites I tagged as PLN are “5 truths of teaching technology to elementary”, “TeacherTube”, and “PLN to PLAN, moving schools forward”. I tagged these as PLN because they add to my learning and understanding of using technology inside the classroom.
The learning network I decided to follow is called, "The Educator's PLN" (http://edupln.com/forum/topics/ipads-in-the-elementary) where educators come together and dedicate the site to collaborate together. I chose to read a blog post regarding the use of ipads and itouches inside an elementary setting. The results teachers found from experimenting were not disappointing, and the most used subject teachers used ipads for was phonics and creative arts. Although, a problem one teacher found was that the size of the childrens hands made it hard for them to not rest their palms on the pad, messing up the interface. I think that using ipads or technology like it is going to be the new fad inside classrooms, especially young classrooms as early as first grade!
Twitter, Delicious and Digital Discussion Forums like "The Educator's PLN" are all resources any teacher could benefit from!!
No comments:
Post a Comment