Blog Post #5

This blog is all about Personal Learning Networks or PLNs. These are networks of people and tools that you can go to when you need to consult someone on anything, especially in the field of teaching. These people and tools can be other teachers (locally and internationally) and websites that can range from a variety of subjects and information. Having these networks are great for the teacher. You can use Twitter, Facebook, Blogger and other social networking sites to collaborate with other teachers and people who have or are studying in certain fields that could be taught in the classroom. It's a great way to gather information, news, projects and even new ways to teach things from others who have experienced what you are about to go through.

I actually started my PLN today. Of course I started it on Twitter, since to me that seems the easiest to begin with. I added my ARTS in Elementary teacher, Dr. Paige Vitulli. She has made her Twitter a PLN and expresses the benefits of this in her class consistently. I also did a search for elementary education and found several resources for my future classroom and ideas. Although after this I found myself stuck. I honestly didn't know what else to look for and who else to look for. Even though one of the sites we were given to look into was a previous project by Dr. Strange on this very subject. He gave us different teachers Twitter names to look into and start following if we saw fit, but after looking into quite a few I decided I didn't want to follow any of them. I guess I prefer to search for my own connections and colleagues to be in my PLN.

I even signed up for the site Symbaloo. Its a website that basically puts all your other websites onto one page. It compiles all the sites you want to use and it places them all in front of you for easy access. I am still new at using it, but I like it so far. Instead of overloading my favorites with websites (which shows at the bottom of my Google status bar), I can add just the one website and have all my sites at my fingertips. It's very convenient.