Miss Jones's Teaching World : My PLN (Personal Learning Network)

My Personal Learning Network Journey

At the beginning of our semester, we were challenged to construct our Personal Learning Network as it stood at that time. I must admit, it was lacking, to say the least. (See below). Throughout the course of the semester, I have been collecting connections and resources that I can use to find answers (research), learn new things, contribute my own ideas to and collaborate with other professions with the use of chats, blogs and social sites.

This semester, because of my connection with my Math Educator - Julie Hatzler, I was able to volunteer for the STEM festival at the Science Center to help teach elementary students basic math skills through games! While I was there, I visited with Central Iowa AG In The Classroom booth and I was given information on how to enrich my future students with lessons, activities, information, resources an outreach in regards to Iowa's Agricultural realm. This taught me that I can expand my Personal Learning Network by also being physically present in social settings involving education. The connections I have made in just one semester, involve a wide variety of social media and will allow me a tremendous opportunity for me to enhance my professional development.

I created my very first Twitter & Pinterest account, have knowledge of learning/lesson planning apps and have created a Teacher’s Page on Facebook for parents and students to follow. After collecting all of these resources, I needed to put them all in one place, so I created a Symbaloo account. These are just a few of the many resources, apps, and social connections I have made during this semester. I am very grateful for this assignment because I will be able to use my PLN to help form relationships, stay informed and be able to keep myself up to date with new knowledge as a teacher.

Twitter: One of the first resources I created was my own professional Twitter account. Twitter is a wonderful place to share ideas and form connections with other professionals. New tweets allow me to stay up to date with happenings within the educational world. I will benefit from this resource in my future teaching because I will be able to stay up with the latest trends in education, and I will have a growing network of teachers to collaborate with. Below is my account today...

Pinterest: I love how you can share ideas and create boards with various pins/ideas. I created a folder labeled "Elementary Education" and have been pinning ideas, weekly to this folder for future use as a teacher. I am so glad that I created my account because Pinterest will allow me to share creative ideas for lesson plans, activities, crafts, ways to integrate technology into the classroom, organization within the classroom and much more to people that are following me. I will benefit from this resource in my future teaching because it will help me put together a collection of ideas that I will be able to utilize in my own classroom someday.

Teacher's Facebook Page: I found this resource towards the end of our class while looking at examples of the other PLNs students had created. I thought this was a fantastic way to reach out to students, parents and other teachers during the school year with a page that would be strictly dedicated to education and happenings within the classroom. I could put reminders for due dates, events in the classroom and even have a shared group for parents to ask questions. I will benefit from this resource in my future teaching because it will provide a resource for my students to access. I could even put up important alerts, due dates or specific information for parents such as early outs, and no school days. Endless possibilities!

Symbaloo: After a while, I found myself with an abundance of resources and apps but they were strung out all over the place in various bookmarks. As this was starting to drive me a bit bonkers; I realized that I needed to put my social media accounts, the blogs I found, the various teacher websites, etc. in one place. As a solution to this problem, I created a Symbaloo account. This is a free visual and bookmarking tool where each person can make their own webixer with tiles linked to an URL on the internet. Another cool thing about Symbaloo is that you can look up other webmixers that other users have created. There are tons of Teacher Resource Themed Mixers available for you to use as well. I also added this to my home screen accessing these usefull apps and resources a breeze!

Here is a snapshot of my account today...