Journal 7: My Personal Learning Network

1.My PLN is my Personal learning Network. At first these words intimidated me and made me feel that I was about to enter a realm that I could never understand or feel comfortable. Yet after exploring the many aspects of creating a PLN I have discovered that it is quite easy and accessible to my needs. My PLN consists of internet tools that will allow me to research and obtain answers to any questions I have, as well as communicate and collaborate with co-workers, friends, and family. Even with people across the globe who share my profession. The ultimate goal of my PLN is to aggregate resources that can be used when I become an educator. This will help me incorporate technology within my classroom and make researching for projects much easier on my students. As well as allow me to share and obtain effective ideas on certain lesson plans.  
2. In this class, I have been introduced to twitter. Before this class, I had never used twitter and was not at all familiar with the site or the tools that accompanied it. Since I have opened an account I have added my entire Education 422 class, as well as 5 other people. The other people I have begun to follow are all educators. Yet two of them focus especially on elementary education, while two others, focus on technology and its incorportation in the classroom and the last one is a k-12 administrator. Today (4/7/11) I partcipated with the #edchat twitter chat from 9-9:31am. It did not seem to have a certain topic but covered many topics. At first I was quite lost as to what I was supposed to be looking for or obtaining from the chat. Yet after about 5 minutes, the chat began to make sense. I followed a couple of the links people posted and found a couple of interesting articles. The first was entitled, "Why Social Media Can and Is Changing Education" by William Stites. This was a blog post in which Stites examined 5 ways that social media impacted education. 1. its free 2.it cuts down on isolation. 3. Building tolerance & understanding of cultural diversity. 4. It can amplify passions 5. the world of education is (and needs to be) more open. The basis of these 5 caterorgies came from the idea that "education is based on relationships." Therefore social media plays a pivotal role in today's education. Once I got the hang of the chat, I participated by answering a question and retweeting a couple of interesting sites that I came across.
3. Diigo has become one of my favorite and most accessible tools in my PLN. The ability to bookmark pages/sites that I find important is such a convience for myself. Also the use of including tags for each site make it easier to narrow down my search when looking for something in particular. Also everything that I tagged as PLN, can be accessed through my blog. Since on my blog I placed a diigo tagroll everytime I add a tag to my list it automatically shows up on my tagroll. That way if I am on my blog I can simply click on a certain tag and it will take to straight to the sites that I bookmarked with PLN highlighted within. The most interesting and rewarding part of this site is that I can simpliy type in a key word and find other people who have bookmarked similar sites and in time I can follow them in order to gain more access to the wealth of information they obtain. There are a few sites that I tagged as PLN. Among them I tagged, a wiki for incoportating technology within the classroom. This wiki is filled with insight and videos of the importance of technology within the classroom.I also added a site that gave tips and further secrets on how to use Google docs more effectively. It was entriguing and I will be using some of the ideas in the future as I have already used google docs for a couple of my other courses this semester.
4. I joined the "Educator's PLN" discussion forum. I chose it after browsing around in this site and finding a couple of interesting videos. While browsing around I discovered a blog post entitled, "Potential is an opportunity not a guarentee," by Steve Bollar. His main focus was to show how people tend to not live up to their full potential and he gives three topics for people to consider when "understanding their full potential." One part of realizing a person's full potential is if they are able to risk-takers. Whether they are able to take changes when challenges arise. Secondly, cost is another aspect. The ability for a person to priotorize and realize where they need to devote most of their time. Lastly, the idea of never giving up. Quitting is never a suggestion or option. This blog post was very inspiring because it made me realize that I love coming face to face with challenges and pushing myself to a greater length to discover my full potential. I had never thought about the thought process that went into my drive to do things.