Journal 7

My Personal Learning Network

 A Personal Learning Network (PLN), is a way that people are  able to connect with PLN Educators around the world. PLN is a way that a group of people with the same interest are able to get information from other more experience teachers. This will help teachers progress in their educational field because of the resources they are able to gather. I myself created my own PLN that I know will help me when I become a teacher. I have been getting more involved with Diigo, Twitter, and “The PLN Educators” website. Having my own PLN will help me grow as a person and get connected with people that have my same interest.

 Twitter is a way to stay connected with friends, experts, celebrities and news. Although, I have to say that I now see Twitter as an educational network, because I am able to follow people that are interested in the same profession as I am. I chose to follow Tim St. John, Shelly Terrell, scichat, and Steven Anderson as well as my classmates. I joined a chat by #edchat on November first at 1 in the afternoon which provided many great resources on the different ways we can improve the educational field. I did not chat but I was trying to keep up with what the educators were collaborating during the chat. Being able to join chats will definitely improve our teaching skills or provide our students with many other ways education can be fun. Shelly Terrell the founder of #edchat is one of the best educational bloggers. Shelly provided information that is useful to any one in the educational fields. During the chat many people gathered to collaborate which useful information was provided as well as educational articles. 

Diigo is a social-bookmarking tool that allows the users to save anything that is in the internet as well as to be access from any computer. Diigo has many great features that will help user maintain their accounts organized. For example, it has a way to highlight any important information that you might want to have easy access as well as to put tags which are related to the information. I found an interesting lady by the name of Cyndi Danner which is a digital story teller which was what caught my attention. She loves technology which was why she focused on the different ways technology can be used in the educational field. I chose to follow her because she provides many important resources that will help me become a better teacher. I also bookmark a couple of important cites that describes why having a PLN is important and useful. 

The Educators PLN website is to provide useful and knowledgeable information that will help people in the educational field to connect. I joined both Classroom 2.0 and Educators PLN which both provide information about Personal Learning Network. I was able to focus on “The Educators PLN” which provides videos, chats, forums, blogs, leaderboards and many other resources which all help support the importance of being connected. I watched a video produced by Thomas Whitby which explains how important it is for teachers to teach their students about all the educational websites. It was an informative video regaring the importance of using educational sites and describing how students can benefit from being able to get information from more than one websites.