My Personal Learning Network is in development so it is not terribly large yet. I am currently following six people on Twitter, some of which are individual people involved in the educational field and others that are educational organizations. On Delicious I have seven people in my network of the same variety as I mentioned with Twitter. The purpose of my PLN is to be in contact with other individuals who have the same common interest of education. By doing so, we can bounce ideas off one another and it is a very give-take type of relationship. An advantage is that it's not necessary to personally know these people, I can just follow them to see what new things they discovered or are incorporating into their classroom.
The people I am following on twitter are all educators themselves except for one (one is an education and technology organization). What they all have in common is the passion for teaching and the determination of incorporating more technology into the classroom. I chose to add these people as my followers because I liked that they were just regular teachers with a common cause. That is to say, I will one day be a teacher like themselves so what they say is very relevant to me. I chose to participate in a middle school topic discussion using twitter (#midleved), and it was very interesting. The chat went on all day long and it was simply anything involving middle school. People were tweeting about what they were doing in their classroom that day, what units they were working on, lesson plans they found useful--all kinds of stuff. It was basically just a period of complete resources. I liked it a lot. It was a very fast paced chat and tweets were continually popping up, however, no two were the same; everything everyone tweeted was unique and I liked that a lot.
From this assignment, I gathered that I like Delicious more than Twitter. I like the more slow pace of Delicious and that comments (tweets) are not constantly popping up making it hard to follow at times. The way I found people was by searching education and then adding technology to make it more narrow. I got a lot of results and ended up searching a few pages and adding people who I thought were interesting. I bookmarked the pages I did because they were all tools I could see myself using. I bookmarked a digital storytelling tool, tutorials on using google and using google in unique ways, an article on cyber safety and the prevention of cyber bullying, and the last was a website on integrating different technologies into the classroom.
Finally, I joined The Educator's PLN and I watched a video about using Google Calendar as a way to lesson plan. It was actually very useful and something I could definitely see myself using. The narrator of the video describes how it's so useful and beneficial to have lesson plans on GoogleDocs so you never loose track of anything, you can access it from any computer at anytime, and lastly because it keeps your desk a lot more neat! And I love organization!
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