A teacher that I respect and admire shared with me that her secret to being a great educator is engaging in continuous self-reflection and evolution of her teaching. One of the most powerful ways to continuously evolve my teaching practices is by exposing myself to the ideas and methods of other educators. By creating a virtual community of my peers online through blogs, social media, and collaborative sites, called a Personal Learning Network, I have opened myself to a world of information, advice, tips, and ideas that I can use to my benefit. My PLN consists of blogs that I subscribe to through RSS feeds, a Pinterest account for inspiration, a Diigo account for bookmarking resources, and a membership to a digital discussion forum called Ning. Some of these resources have been more helpful to me than others, but I have learned something from each of them and have honed in on which formats are most efficient and useful to me.
I subscribed to three RSS feeds using an app called Feedly, which organizes the blogs I read into a stream of posts in an almost magazine-like format. The RSS feeds that I chose are Education:NPR, Education Week, and TED Education. Feedly is easy to check on my iPad and I actually already used it to follow other blogs, so adding education-related feeds to my Feedly was very simple. I check it each morning as part of my routine and am able to click on any article that catches my interest. This format has been a very convenient way for me to stay up to date on these sites. TED Education posts interesting video content that could be used as mini-lessons or to accompany a subject we are covering class. Topics vary from things like the origins of the English language to an explanation of how blood pressure works. I could see these being very fun to use in class. It has taught me lots of interesting things that are either very random or very useful and applicable to elementary school standards. Education Week and Education: NPR both post content that is informative and centered on the theme of current events in education. These types of articles cover topics like Common Core, social development, new theories and studies, and many other education-related events. These sites keep me up to date and informed on current developments and help me to develop my own best practices.
Pinterest is a social networking site that allows users to post original content, link to outside sites, and repost others’ posts to their own “pin board.” I was already an avid user of Pinterest for other areas of interest, but I added many education-related pinners and pin boards to my list that I follow. The image-centric nature of Pinterest makes it perfect for gathering inspiration for the layout and function of my future classroom, saving ideas for art projects and lesson plans, and finding printable resources like posters. Some of my favorite things that I have discovered via Pinterest link back to blogs written by elementary school teachers. On these blogs there are countless posts on topics like morning routines, activities for indoor recess, reading group rotations, and math manipulatives, just to name a few. I was so impressed by the vastness of this resource. One example was a first grade teacher from Australia who posted a video of one of her ‘morning meetings.’ This was an example of the way she starts each day with all the students on the rug at the front of the room, going over the daily schedule, working with the calendar and clock, doing some fast-math, and then a timed math game. It was wonderful to see her in action going through her routine and to see the kids’ participation and her classroom management. One downside of Pinterest is that it can be a little bit overwhelming to be faced with such a rabbit-hole of pins and posts. Sometimes I found myself scrolling through an entire blog of a teacher in another state or another country, making note of little things that I would like to incorporate into my classroom. It is easy to play the comparison game and can make me feel like I need lots of “things” to make my classroom the best it can be, when in reality nothing compares in importance to the actual teaching and learning that will take place.
Prior to using Diigo, I would fill my computer with bookmarks and screenshots, intending to save resources or ideas for a later date but instead just creating a disorganized mess of links to be forgotten. Diigo allows me to keep all of my links and tabs in one place with annotations, highlights, and categories to help make accessing them later a quick process. My Diigo library contains resources that mostly center around the themes of Common Core and language arts. For example, I bookmarked a tool for creating digital storyboards that I can use in a creative writing lesson and a link to some reading activities on a site called Funbrain. I also found a series of articles on Common Core that links to many different sources of information on that topic. I find Diigo to be very useful as a link storing site and a means of organizing ideas and saving them for later use. I did not find the networking aspect of Diigo to be as user-friendly or streamlined as other sites. For that reason, it was more difficult to incorporate into my routine of sites to check for new content. I joined groups like the Discovery Educator Network, Math Links, I Love Math, K-8 Math, and Purposeful Learning Technologies. On the occasions that I did try to use Diigo for networking, I had to click through each group to find their most recent posts and then scroll through those to find ones that looked interesting. This format was not visually appealing and was too time-consuming for me to make it a regular habit. Instead of just browsing, I could see myself consulting these groups in the future if I had a more specific question or problem.
The Ning group that I joined is a very large online network of educators called The Educator’s PLN. This is a hub of information where contributors share content. On the home page, there are videos in different languages, countless articles and discussion posts, links to educator’s blogs, groups with more specific themes, podcasts, tutorials, links to apps, and an events calendar. There are so many resources and pages on this one PLN that there is a video tutorial that explains how to navigate the PLN for newcomers. With so much information in one place, it is enough to keep someone busy for weeks. And it is constantly being added to and updated. This was another resource that did not seemlessly integrate into my set of online resources, but because of the quality of the content I did visit the site on numerous occasions to explore. The video links were the most interesting and attention-grabbing for me. In one video I watched, a fourth grader shares her thoughts on standardized testing at her school board’s meeting in an impressive and impassioned speech. After watching this, I would like to include a persuasive writing unit in my class.
Another video that I found on The Educator’s PLN shows teachers reading a letter that they wrote to send back in time to themselves on their first day of teaching. This was really inspiring to watch and even made me emotional, encompassing so many of the fears and feelings that I have about becoming a teacher. This type of positive, inspiring, encouragement is one of my favorite things about the PLN in general. While I plan to find that sort of camaraderie in person with my coworkers, it is reassuring to feel that I am already part of a community of teachers online. The PLN experience has taught me that there are so many resources available to me as a teacher, and that part of my job is to have a discerning eye for high quality resources and information. I plan to keep up with my PLN, specifically with the RSS feeds, Pinterest, and Educator’s PLN. I see this as a way to continue on my never-ending path to improving myself as a teacher. I look forward to discovering more valuable information and tools that will better my students’ learning experience.
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