Journal 7

A PLN is a personal learning network and a personal learning network is a collection of data and contacts through the Internet to help gain knowledge in a certain area. This PLN is going to help my future career in teaching. Included in my PLN is useful websites such as Twitter and Diigo but I am also using tools like Google and Blogger sites to help get easier and faster information for teaching. Using these tools are only my stepping stone to find better internet sources through the web. Ideas and information are endless and my PLN can only build to be bigger and more useful through these amazing Internet tools.

Twitter is an online social networking service that enables people from around the globe to communicate about anything. I have started to build a network through teachers, students, and people in the educational field. By doing this it has let me start my ever so great PLN. There are different criteria to gain valuable information such as hashtags, which lets someone communicate about a subject and then let other people who are also interested in that research to see all the resources about it. Hashtags can be defined as a tag embedded in a message in a social networking service, consisting of a word within the message prefixed with a hash sign. Whenever I tweet I am able to let other people who are following me see what my ideas are and the same thing goes for when I follow people. I have started to follow a few educators and principals who have gave me some valuable news and information already. More specifically I started to follow one principle who works at New Milford High School, he is a Google Certified Teacher, and is a NASSP Ntional Digital Principle Award Winner and goes by the name Eric Sheninger. I am also following classmates from my EDUC 422 class as well as my Professor Jeff Heil. There are also chat rooms which let me see what people have questions about all at one set time. The chat room I attended was #edchat on April 9 at 4:45 and the subject they were on was the power of reflection. It was good to enter into this chat because I was able to see what educators were concerned about and how reflection can help educators gain a journal of success. From the chat I learned that reflecting on your thoughts is a useful tool to help become positively involved with students. I also think that my blog is a good way for me to reflect on what I can do better and see my progress in my PLN and career as an educator.

A big part of PLN that I am most interested in using is Diigo. Diigo is a social bookmarking application that lets myself and others share information on the web to each other but by giving each other the direct source. The difference between Diigo bookmarks and your personal bookmarks is that it is out there for everyone to use and for you to also gain more. I can also follow people such as my professor, classmates, and other people who I have interest in gaining material from. This contributed to my PLN by putting relevant information that is available to me with a simple search. Some of the websites I have bookmarked is Connected Principles website, which let me see what Principles are doing to keep up with digital tools and giving these tools out for everyone to use. Wiki's in Education, which lets educators come together to share tips about using wikis to enhance the learning experience. And I also bookmarked Classroom 2.0, which is a collaborative social website for educators who are interested in Social Media, and Participative Technologies in the classroom.

I joined the Educator's PLN, which is the personal learning network for educators. It is a site that contains collaborative information. I had to sign up and be approves to become a part of the group, this lets me and others become exclusive from those who are spammers or trying to send junk mail and information to the website. This tool has blogs, videos, and information relevant to education. I explored a video on KONY 2012, which is a popular upbringing to all of us to stop a man in Uganda that has been kidnapping children to become vicious young soldiers or prostitutes. This video is suppose to help start a new era where the social network will help to catch Joseph Kony. This video helps me understand just how big social networking is and what other educators are doing and thinking about news such as this topic on Joseph Kony.