As a special education teacher my PLN consists of other special education teachers, advocacy groups, people involved with special needs students and parents of special needs children that I have met and follow on twitter.com, diigo.com and Educator’s PLN forums. By following other special education teachers on twitter.com and diigo.com, I can stay current on special education strategies and technologies that my PLN tweets about or bookmarks on diigo.com. I can also stay current by reading forum posts and watching online videos from Educator’s PLN forum. Being apart of twitter, diigo and Educator’s PLN I am participating in a global learning community, exploring creative various teaching strategies and applications of technology for student learning. With the participation of those technologies and community building I am able to exhibit how to infuse technology in my learning, I am able to help my peers learn from what I tweet, bookmark and post on twitter.com, diigo.com and Educator’s PLN.
A personal learning network (PLN) is a group of people
connecting and interacting about with similar interests. As a special education teacher my PLN
consists of other special education teachers, advocacy groups, people involved
with special needs students and parents of special needs children that I have
met on the internet. I discuss and
share knowledge with my peers through the use of Diigo.com, Twitter.com and
discussion forums such as The Educator’s PLN. I also share information to my PLN through my blog.
I use Twitter.com to connect with my network by the use of
hashtags. Hashtags are used in Twitter.com
to filter information during searches.
When searching for a topic or group, I would search for a specific
hashtag. In my case I searched for
SPEDCHAT. Searching for SPEDCHAT
led me to discovering peers who are in the special education community. I follow their tweets and read what
they have to say. I also found out
that there is an online discussion on Tuesdays at 5:30 for regarding special
education. People within the field
of special education will post on Twitter.com questions and comments pertaining
to the topic during the discussion.
By searching SPEDCHAT at 5:30
on Tuesday I was able to follow along to the current discussion regarding
special education. Tuesday August 2nd’s
discussion was on inclusion, meaning including special needs students into a
general education classroom. The
discussion flowed very quickly and it was hard to keep up, but also
informative. Of course there are
disagreements here and there because opinions are opinions. Some links were posted and information
regarding various programs was out there.
Diigo.com is an online bookmarking website. To bookmark a website means to save
that website address so you can access it later. You are able to save all your bookmarks online and have them
accessible to any computer with Internet access. All Internet browsers can bookmark/save websites, the unique
thing about Diigo.com is that it saves it online and makes your bookmarks
available to your circle of friends, or PLN. The websites that you save/bookmark are tagged by you and
then saved, to tag a bookmark means to assign keywords to a specific saved
website. These keywords are
sometimes universal, so if other people were to be interested in topic, they
can search Diigo.com, for a keyword/tag and websites pertaining to those topics
would come up. You can follow
people on Diigo.com, just like Twitter.com and watch the various types of
websites they save. I choose
to follow people who saved and shared websites that pertain to special
education. I currently follow my esteem technology
professor, various awesome classmates such as Amy S and mringerson. I searched for any websites with
the special education keyword and followed those who are in the field and post
up a lot of special education articles and websites. With my search I found
and followed a technology professor at University of Conneticut, David Warlick
(citation machine creator), and
two other special education teachers
A discussion forum I chose to join was Educators PLN. This website has a plethora of
information. It has links to
educator’s blog posts, Twitter.com, Diigo.com’s and Youtube videos. There is a lot of information available
on this website. I read a blog post
on stepping outside the comfort zone.
This commentary was regarding the older teacher’s reluctance in moving
forward. Standing still and
sticking to the blackboard and chalk.
Teaching with old methods and being content. The author urges teachers to keep on moving forward, move
with the advancement of technology, learn how to incorporate technology into
the classroom, and step outside the comfort zone. It was very interesting, urging the older generation to be
with the new generation, because it is really about the students, not about
your own comfort zone. Educators
PLN is a great resource to find other teachers in the same boat as you. You are not alone with some of your
thoughts.
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