Jornal 7 My Personal Learning Network (NETS III, & IV)

A personal Learning Network, or PLN is a resource used by teachers to enhance the their teaching skills.  It is other educators, parents, or school personnel who collaborate and share ideas, on how to better improve the teaching and education experience.  To start creating my PLN I have used Twitter, Diigo, and CLassroom 2.0.  These tools will help me as a future educator to reach out to the education community to get ideas, input, and outside viewpoints from a group of people who are passionate about education, so much so that they use and contribute to PLNs.

TWITTER:  I participated in a Twitter discusion through the use of a program called Tweet Chat.  Tweet Chat organizes the discussion, and allows one to pause the conversation, and go back, incase the conversation is happening to fast, or if their is an important piece of information that was missed.  I participated in a group discussion under the hash tag #edchat.  This hash tag lets the user know that all the information they are receiving is from other users using the same hash tag, that way you can know that all the information has to do with education.  The #edchat group meets on Tuesday at 1:00 P.M.  The discussion I participated in was "What specific methods can schools use to involve parents in a positive way?"  I learned that this was the topic by just typing the question "what is today's topic?"  The information came in fits and starts.  First I would see maybe one or two comments appear, but then there would dump like ten or more comments at once.  At first I would pause to try and read all of the comments, but I soon realized that many of the comments did not merit pausing the whole show for.  The other thing is that when I did pause I was even further behind.  I read a couple of really good ideas, one that I really liked was to contact parents once in a while for positive reasons.  Usually a call home means that the student is in trouble in school, so parents start to dread hearing from their child's teachers, I definitely think that we as educators should establish an open line of communication with the parents and get them involved in a way other then as disciplinarian, because that not only alienates the parents, it also makes the students dislike parent involvement.  There were also some bad ideas too.  One person wanted to do "morning muffins with moms, or doughnuts with dads".  Personally I cringed at this idea because I, like many people grew up in a single working mother household.  This idea seems to only benefit children who are already fortunate enough to have parents who are either both involved, or are able to take time in the morning, when most people have to work.  It seems that the parents who need to be reached out to, to be involved, most likely would not have the luxury of being able to attend morning muffins with mom.

Diigo:  Is a great way to find helpful internet sites that have been screened by people who are not out to profit, i.e. advertisers.  Diigo allows you, and other people you follow, to bookmark helpful sites, and to attach key words that will help you locate that page.  For .....