My PLN

I have to confess that my personal learning network is still a bit scanty.  I have attempted to follow blogs and wikis of other teachers by adding them to my rss feeds on my igoogle account.  I loved the Googledoc. project and can really see its usefulness in the classroom.  Google Earth was really fun to experiment with and another great teaching tool.  The tool that I had the most problem with was delicious.  I was using Google Chrome as my browser and I thought I had imported my bookmarks but now I can't seem to access my account at all. So, though it seems like a great tool, it has only been frustrating to me.

I will continue to use the tools I found useful, hopefully becoming more skillful in the future.  Since I only get to use them occasionally in the classroom, I haven't had much of an opportunity to become comfortable with any of them. I also would have no way to develop a PLN with others in a school.

I definitely see the advantage of a PLN in that it connects you with other people who are interested in the same things you are.  I can see how learning to use these tools can help a person to access the great amount of ideas out there.

Twitter was the least helpful of the tools we were introduced to.  It reminds me of Facebook, which I don't really care for.  I also see very little use for it in the classroom. I will probably not continue to use it.

Great websites

I see so many great websites featured in other peoples' links that I fear I could do nothing for a week but look at new sites with great teaching ideas.  Several that I added are cooltoolsforschools, thirty interesting ways to use twitter, wetpaint, when youtube is blocked, and technology tidbits.

My list of tags has definitely grown.  I started out with education and reading.  But now I have added social media, googlesites, writing, literacy, and more.  I have been fairly consistent in my use of tags, not using synonyms, though that does sound like a good idea.  The reading tag that I started with doesn't seem too effective so I have borrowed some tags from others that seem to lead to more interesting sites.  These tags do seem to be useful for all the different tools we have used.  I would teach kids to use tags that are more descriptive- like using literacy instead of reading.

I have been using education and technology tags the most frequently.

I didn't add annotations because I didn't know what I was doing.  I think it would be advantageous if I can figure out how to do it.

I found that both Stacey and Geri bookmarked some of the same things I did.  When I looked at other people who had a similar interest in education and literacy, I found several that looked promising that I added to my network.

Del.icio.us could be used with a group of students by adding them to each others' networks and then they could share the bookmarks that they find in relation to a project or report.

These social networking tools could add so much to the classroom to foster student communication and collaboration when students work on a project together and are able to instantly access and add to each other's thoughts.  What a great way to stimulate problem solving and critical thinking!  There are many great ideas out there for topics but the main benefit is getting kids to read, think and write.  Getting administrators to give some of them a try would be the best way to convince them, I think.