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Educator PLN is a personal learning network for educators. It presents information in many different formats. Everything in the Educator PLN is specific to the teaching profession. I found this to be helpful because unlike other social networking sites (Google+, Twitter, Linkedin, etc), Educator PLN isn’t clogged with junk information. It is educator specific and provides many great tips and networking opportunities.
I used this website to network with other professionals. I really liked being able to talk to other educators. I found a group where new teachers can connect with experienced teachers to find mentors. Educator PLN offers a great way to connect with others without the sketchy posts that can be found on other pages.
I would use Educator PLN within my classroom to find lesson plans and reach out to other professionals to find new ideas. This website doesn’t really offer a way for students (other than preservice teachers) to interact but it’s purpose is to connect educators not students. The Ning platform could be used to creating classroom pages, so a teacher could use the same layout for a classroom page for students within their class.
Delicious is a very helpful website. It offers a way to bookmark websites on the web in a cloud format. Therefore, instead of bookmarking particularly important websites on your home computer and classroom computer, a teacher can sign up for a Delicious account. Once you have an account, you can start saving websites and tagging them by topic. For example, I tagged all of my PLN websites, #PLN. Then when I wanted to work on my PLN I just went to Delicious and I had a list of all of the important websites that I needed to get my work done. I also used PLN this semester to save websites that had technologies or lesson plans that I could use once I start teaching.
I would use Delicious in my classroom to save websites for classroom use. If I wanted to show video clips to my class about a certain topic, I would save links to the webpages and tag them with the unit name. Students could also use Delicious. If they are working on a Web Quest, the teacher could give them a list of websites to bookmark so that they could keep track of the information they obtained.
Evernote is a pretty simple website that can be used to keep notes. It allows the user to create virtual notebooks to store information. Notes can be tagged in order to organize them by content. Evernote is a cloud-based software so the user can access notes from any computer or smart phone. I even uploaded the Evernote app onto my phone, I considered writing grocery lists on it (I hate when I leave my grocery list at home).
Teachers can use Evernote to brainstorm lesson plans from anywhere such as the library or their phone if they’re in a waiting room or they don’t have access to a computer. I used it this semester to brainstorm ideas for blogs and projects. This allowed me to work on it from any computer without the pressure of saving it because Evernote automatically saves everything as you type.
Students could use Evernote in school to take notes for classes. Especially with the new Bring Your Own Technology policies in school, students can bring a technology from home to take notes and still have access to the information if they forget their technology. They can login from any computer, school or home, and see the notes that they took. Notes can be shared too! If a student was absent, another student could send them the notes that they missed. This technology is something I will seriously consider using in my classroom to help students stay organized and have constant access to their materials.
Feedly is a technology that can be used to save blogs and websites. Whenever a new post is uploaded on a particular blog, Feedly puts a link to the new post on the user’s homepage. Therefore, users can login to get daily updates on their favorite blogs.
I used Feedly this semester primarily for keeping track of classmates’ blogs. I added all of the blogs for my classmates during the first couple weeks of the semester then when they added a new post, I was able to see it on Feedly. I tagged all of my classmate’s blogs in a category titled INDT blogs. This can in handy when I was commenting on blogs. I was able to indicate who had completed their blogs and skim over them all before commenting on one.
I would use Feedly in the classroom to keep track of student blogs. It allows you to categorize so I would group them by class. For example, I would group all of 1st period together. Students’ blogs could be used for reflecting on their learning and metacognition. It would allow me to quickly access all of their blogs and keep them in an organized fashion.
LinkedIn is a professional social media website. It is used to network amongst colleagues in similar disciplines. Basically, LinkedIn provides an online platform for your resume that allows others to endorse you in particular subjects and areas. One great part about LinkedIn is that it doesn’t have a lot of foolishness. Those that are on LinkedIn are there to present their professional life, not their personal life.
Teachers can use LinkedIn to find jobs or connect with others in their field. LinkedIn is not educator specific. It has professionals from all different types of professions such as real estate agents, engineers, and researchers. LinkedIn can be used to post information about seminars and events. Mostly, it seems to be used for showcasing professional achievements. LinkedIn isn’t a website that I would use daily, unless I was trying to find a job. I am connected with others outside of the teaching discipline so I found that a lot of information on my LinkedIn didn’t pertain to education and thus it wasn’t really useful for me. LinkedIn does offer a way to see how many connections you are away from someone else. This could be useful if you are looking for a job and you want to see if you can get connected with someone in a particular school district.
Twitter seems to be a good social media-networking site for connecting with organizations to get quick tidbits of information. Organizations and individuals post information about conferences, newspaper articles, and blogs. But mostly, Twitter is used to relay short bursts of information about people’s personal lives.
The problem with using this site for networking is that the user can only post content of 140 characters or less. However, there are websites that will allow a user to create shortened URLs so that links can be posted to Twitter. Therefore users can connect larger amounts of content to their Twitters but mostly it is used for posting quick updates.
I don’t think that I will use Twitter in my classroom. Some may use it for connecting professionals across the world with student but I think I would use another resource such as Educator PLN for these purposes. Other websites just simply have less useless information and fewer sketchy people.
One example that we discussed this semester for using Twitter in the classroom was that it could be used to pose questions online to large groups of people. It was used by one teacher to ask professionals over the world the temperature in their location, this provided a quick way for students to obtain information about weather patterns for a project. However, using Twitter for these purposes requires that a user has at least some connections all over the world. I just don’t use it enough to have the amount of connections necessary to create a large project such as the one in the example.
One benefit of getting used to the Twitter platform is that we, as educators, can learn how to use it as our students do. This is important because it allows us to be familiar with the technology in case something happens while students are using it, such as one student cyberbullying another. Being familiar with Twitter can help a teacher understand how to access information about students that might be involved in bullying one another on the website.
I feel as though Twitter is best utilized as a personal social media networking site, instead of a professional platform.
Community of Practice (Educator PLN)
Delicious
Evernote
Feedly
Google Sites
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