My PLN is a great way for me to connect with a community of people who have resources and knowledge in education and technology. I have found a vast array of tools and information that will allow me to provide my students with valuable experiences using technology in the classroom. Twitter is a great resource that I used to people add to my network who are connected to education and technology. I am currently following these five profiles on Twitter: EdTechUNcon, Vibe Teaching, Learn Boost, Game Classroom, and our professor-Jeff Heil. EdTechUNcon provides website and links to webtools. It talks about a screen cast which is a live conference that teachers use to grade student assignment. The conference is a video that allows students to view comments that were made on their assignments and refer back to them. The teacher can talk to students as if he/she is right in front of them.
Vibe Teaching also provides great websites. The best children books of all time is one in particular that I love because children books are my favorite. There is also a video about UK schools teacher recruitment which is pretty interesting. Learn Boost offers lesson plan software, calendars, scheduling, attendance tracking, and more, and it's all free! Game classroom offers educational games, worksheets, and homework help for students in grades K-12. This website that offers kinder games and homework help: http://bit.ly/b022xU, is very useful for me because I am currently working with that grade level in an academic enrichment program. Lastly, and most importantly I am following our professor because he has great resources in his network that I can view and add to my network.I also participated in a educational chat on twitter on the topic of teacher evaluations.
The tweets that other people responded with were very interesting. The one comment that I agree with completely is, "the focus should be on the level of engagement of the kids and what the teacher is doing to foster it." That is exactly what administrators should be looking for in classrooms. When students are engaged they will learn something. Someone else in the chat said that what the teacher is doing is not important, what's important is that the students are engaged, but that doesn't make sense. Unless the teacher continuously works onon keeping the students engaged their level of focus will diminish and learning will also diminish.Participating in the edchat was interesting and I learned useful information about the opinions formulated on the topic. I have used delicious to research a lot of useful information about education.
I will use the information I learned about technology to integrate it into the classroom and I will continue to research and bookmark sites with technology tools on Delicious. My PLN tags on delicious are a variety of technology resources. I tagged a site called "12 Coolest Search Engines You've Never Heard Of," that provides twelve different ways to search for information online. That is going to be very useful for me as a teacher and for my students when they are researching something on the Internet for assignments. I also tagged Teacher Tube, a website for teacher videos. Another tag I chose was a media literacy education site which offers lesson plans for different subjects and all grade levels. T-box planet is a student and teacher community website that I also tagged because it provides great resources and tips that will help me to build a virtual community with my students.A fifth and final tag I chose is an article titled: Project Red: Do 1:1 Right or don't do it at all, about one-to-one use of computers in the classroom because I feel it provides great tips for the effective use of computers in the classroom.
I joined a digital discussion forum on Classroom 2.0 and I found a blog post in the forum that discussed the question: should teachers be add current students to their facebook network? The discussion was interesting,because the responses were pretty much divided. Some people think that it is ok for teachers to be involved with their students in a social networking community and others think that it is not a good idea. Some people think that it might be ok if the teachers were to have contact with their former students when the student reaches the adult age. My personal view on the topic is teachers should not contact current students on facebook, but once they are adults and no longer a student in the class it is ok to be friends on facebook. Of course that means teachers need to make sure their facebook accounts are representing themselves in the most professional way, but they should be representing themselves in that way in their every day lives regardless of situation.
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