NETS- 5:Journal 7: My Personal Learning Network.

In the interest of maintaining the goal of life-long learning a Personal Learning Network is a great way to keep informed about teaching that combines social networks like Twitter, with web based tools like Diigo, forums such as Classroom 2.0 and those are just the ones I chose to work with there are plenty more out there to be discovered. A personal learning network has always been around however in recent years it has been able to expand into a global market with these tools and especially the internet. I feel that a PLN will help me to keep my lessons interesting and engaging through the use of shared ideas within my learning It network. Through Diigo I can save my research project ideas and the sites that sparked those ideas as well as lesson plans for my students.

My use of Twitter has been a surprisingly rewarding experience. I have been able to connect with two very useful chats to gain content for my classroom and those are #sschat and #wrldchat. I have collected various other people as well many of whom are established history teachers who have amazing ideas. I also have education chat and new teacher chat and am working on collecting people out of those chat groups as well. I have posted different sources pertaining to my history field as well as attained a huge amount of support and help from those people in the chats.

In terms of Diigo, as a networking tool I do not feel that it is as strong as Twitter. However, I have collected some students who are in various stages of their education, mostly those that are in their masters programs or those in the doctoral program. I wanted to add these people because I am interested in their experiences and the resources they will come up with in doing these higher studies can be beneficial. Since I am just beginning to find tools that will help me build my PLN those are the things I tagged in my account, sites that talk about how to build a successful PLN using different tools to broaden your horizons. I feel that these will come in handy in the future to reference as resources.




Visit Classroom 2.0
I have joined Classroom 2.0, which is a discussion forum online for teachers. They have different forums based on content which was very interesting to me. It also have some great information pertaining to technology in the classroom. For example one thread was about classroom tools and I learned about a lot more I didn't know, Quizlet for example is a tool that allows students to make flashcards of vocabulary and then creates games pertaining to those flashcards. I rushed over to the site and bookmarked in in Diigo to use a a homework resource.