Competency 4

4. Demonstrate the ability to keep current with professional issues through assessing and monitoring existing and emerging technologies for possible application to teaching and learning

Standards addressed

  • DPI 1902 standards:
    • 9.g: Participate and collaborate as members of a social and intellectual network of learners to share library, technology, and education best practices.
    • 10.e: Leverage an understanding of school and community needs to identify and invest in digital resources to support student learning.
    • 10.f: Identify, evaluate, and employ current and emerging technologies with students, teachers, parents, and administrators to support success and innovation in student learning.
  • ISTE for Educators:
    • 1. Learner
    • 2. Leader

Personal Learning Network

In-person network

I have been developing a face-to-face personal learning network through conferences, workshops and professional associations for many years. I am a member of

    • American Association of School Librarian (I read their magazine, Knowledge Quest)
    • International Society for Technology in Education (numerous online offerings)
    • Wisconsin Educational Media and Technology Association (on board for several terms)

I have attended the AASL biannual conference several times, ALA annual conference numerous times, ISTE national conference twice, and WEMTA almost yearly since 1994. I have also attended the SLATE conference and the EdCamp at South Milwaukee once each. I have attended workshops at my school related to online learning issues.

Virtual network

In the digital world, I started collecting bookmarks in Delicious a number of years ago but switch to Diigo as my curation tool in 2011 (ID: schroede). I have used this fairly consistently to save resources useful to me as well as designating either tags or groups for classes I teach to share resources with students. I have a number of people in my network (e.g., Donna Baumbach, Will Richardson, Joyce Valenza, Elizabeth McCarthy) and have joined a few groups. I find the tool most useful as my own personal curation tool. I have also tried Zotero and Refworks for saving useful resources from databases and the web, but don't use these consistently. I have found Evernote useful for recording notes and meeting summaries. I have also experimented with ScoopIt as a curation tool and examined a range of others .

I follow a range of blogs using Flipboard on my iPad. I find this a useful tool for pulling them all together in one place. The most useful blogs are NeverEndingSearch (Valenza), Edudemic, Mindshift and TeachThought.

More recently I have joined several Google+ Communities. I have made Google+ the home page for my browser, so I scan these each morning.

I do have a Twitter account, but I use it mainly for following the discussion during conferences. I use TweetDeck to track a few hashtags related to school libraries and learning commons.

I use Facebook largely for personal connections, but I have found that The School Librarian's Workshop is a good account to follow.

Learning New Technologies

I am constantly seeking new technologies for use in my classes to support learning. One area that has been problematic for me is assuring that students have actually viewed videos assigned before class. I used EdPuzzle to add questions to be answered by students during the viewing of a video. I could then review the responses before class to address areas that were not understood and to see who actually viewed the video.

Reflection

I have tried lots of different ways to keep up with new trends over the years. I have moved away from some of my face-to-face connections and spend more time developing online communities. I started following many more people in the beginning but have narrowed it down to something more manageable. I try to look at these 2-3 times a week and save the most useful items in Diigo with appropriate tags.