Journal #7: My Personal Learning Network (Nets-5)

What is PLN and will it help me as a teacher:

My personal learning network is something that I have created that is web based that will help me get valuable information from other people from around the world that share some of my same interests.  My personal learning network allows me to communicate with other educators, students, and parents.  It is away for me to share my ideas with other people and gives everyone access to whatever I decide I want to have on my PLN.  Having a PLN will help me once I’m a teacher because it gives me access to so many educators throughout the world.  Through my PLN I can easily learn about new and older ways of teaching that can be effective in my classroom.  With all of the tools and resources that are available it is difficult to keep track of everything but with a PLN you constantly have reminders so it is a great way to have fresh ideas for your classroom.  By having a PLN you are constantly learning how to be a better teacher.

Twitter:
I am new to twitter so it’s taking me some time to familiarize myself with this tool but I can already see the resourcefulness of it. I have started following kevcreutz, Ithumann, tonitheisen, smartinez, and jheil65. I chose to follow these people because I took a look at their profile and past tweets and I can see that they share information that is interesting to me as a future educator. I participated on #edchat on November 16^th at 4pm. The topic being discussed was is the education system broken or outdated. Most people believe that our education system is both broken and outdated. One of the major problems is that teachers have to teach inside the box because of having to teach to the test. Even with teachers being limited on how they teach education is slowly seeing improvements. If we are a product of bad education and we managed to continue to go to school then there is hope for students now and in the future. I think the twitter chat was interesting because you get live response from people that have knowledge on the topic being discussed

Delicious:

I am using Delicious to read information about educating so that I can learn to be a more effective teacher.  By adding people to my Delicious network that I find share valuable information gives me access to more resources I can possibly use in my classroom.  I have added these people (Elizabeth Wilson, Jeffery, JendeW, Karlene, & L) to my network because they are interested in education and they share information that is interesting to me.  There were several things that I tagged “PLN”

-Respect Essential In a High Poverty School/Connected Principals

-What is Good Teaching?

-Personal Learning Networks 101

-A Primer on Personal Learning Networks

-23 Resources about Learning Networks

-Jeff Goldstein: The remarkable Power of Twitter

The reason I tagged these is because I think they are either interesting topics to read about in education or they can help me improve my personal learning network.

I joined The Educator’s PLN because it has lots of useful information that should concern everyone involved in education. The blog post I read was about how immigration is an educational issue.  The teacher who posted the blog discussed how one of her students shared his concern about college and scholarship applications because his mother was deported last year.  The student is currently living with siblings and has no money for college.  This is an important topic because as future teachers we will encounter students that are facing these tuff situations, especially here in California where Latino students make up over 50% of student population and raids by ICE continue to separate families.  As future educators we need to be aware of the issues some of our students will be facing.