My personal learning network project
This past semester, I was given the opportunity to work on a project where I created my own personal learning networks and many different interactions. I created a professional Twitter account where I interacted with many different educators, heard different ideas, and saw different ways to remain positive on social media all while connecting it back to my future career.
In the future I plan on using my Twitter to reach out to my students and parents of my students. I hope to stay in contact with my fellow educators and share different tweets and ideas on the internet. I hope to become a digital citizen and "inspire students to positively contribute and responsibly participate in the digital world" (ISTE Standards for Educators, 4). I want to be able to bring about a new inspiration to my students and share my educational ideas and successes into the world. I learned that social media is a great tool to promote education and reach out to my fellow educators. I loved being able to see other ideas and suggestions from veteran teachers and I hope to see more in the future as a teacher.
In addition to creating a Twitter, I created a professional Pinterest account where I saw different ideas for education in all subject areas all across the board. I saw many fun different social studies ideas such as making balloon globes, fun ways to learn fractions, and even creative sentence builders. I saw all sorts of ways to decorate and organize a classroom, and inspirational quotes to help motivate my future students to help them learn.
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The overall use of a professional social media account helped me grow to not only learn more about the site, but connect it back to my future career and use it to my benefit rather than viewing it as a waste of time or way of procrastination. I learned that social media is used as an overall benefit and way to share ideas. In the future, I hope to use Pinterest as a way to creatively differentiate instruction to the diversity and interests of my future students. I plan on using Pinterest as a way for the parents of my students to follow and see what ideas I have generating for the classroom and their child's learning as well.
professional organization
![Picture](/uploads/1/1/7/4/117450340/editor/fullsizeoutput-48a.jpeg?1525191946)
I created an account with the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) where I created my own personal learning library where I created my own collections filled with science resources to use in the classroom. I reviewed different resources and lessons, commented on discussion boards, and received a total of 170 "Activity Points".
The best way I could describe my journey on this website was like an entirely new social media site for science teachers. I read and saw different lessons based off of science and built up my profile. I tweeted out my thoughts on different resources on this website and learned how to use different websites and lessons recommended by other science teachers. In the future I hope to use these lessons and resources on the website in my classroom and work on creating an even stronger profile for other teachers to see and use as well!
resource community
For my resource community, I joined Common Sense Education and PBS learning media. Both of these websites had multiple educational resources that could be used for differentiated learning in the classroom and was able to create a profile and explore many different resources that I could use in the future! On Common Sense Education, I was able to easily review different resources and read other teachers reviews! I even tweeted some of them and got some likes/retweets in response. Check out some of my reviews below:
For PBS learning, I was able to organize my resources into folders and classrooms, "favorite" different activities, and explore many different opportunities for teaching. I tweeted out and shared some of my favorite lessons and thought of different ways to integrate them into classrooms. These resource communities not only taught me a great deal of differentiated instruction online for my classroom, but I also loved being able to see the different ways teachers used them in their classrooms. I can use these to organize the online learning into subjects and classes for my future students and classrooms. These resources are all things that I can keep in mind and on tap once I become a teacher, as long as I can keep up to date with them. I personally have always been a pencil and paper kind of gal when it came to learning. But in Will Oremus' article "No MorePencils, No More Books" he talks about the benefits of online learning and how the lack of textbooks and pencils are not as bad as they seem, thanks to programs such as "ALEKS" and others mentioned on these resource sites. Since joining these online resource communities, I have a new sense of hope and reassurance for less pencil and paper materials and more of online learning.
professional Blog/final thoughts
It states in the Ohio Code of Licensure that all teacher and students must maintain a professional relationship outside of school on social media. While I definitely believe this and agree with this statement, I believe that social media and the world wide web is a great resource to maintain a healthy teacher/student relationship. Teachers can violate this by the negative or inappropriate posts on social media, but I have found throughout this project that a professional blog is the best way to maintain this happy medium. I have loved having this blog as an online profile and a great tool for the parents and students to see who I am and learn more about me without crossing the border of personal. In my future teaching career, I hope to use this blog as a way to journal my teaching experience and keep my fellow educators and parents up to date.
Building my personal learning network has shown me how to build up my online professional profile, creating online relationships with fellow educators, and gain new ideas. Technology is always changing today, and it is important to stay up to date on all that comes with it. This experience has helped me become more comfortable with changing technology and stepping outside of my comfort zone and learning new ways to use technology in the classroom instead of remaining old fashioned, because although it is my personal preference for learning, it may not be to my future students.
Building my personal learning network has shown me how to build up my online professional profile, creating online relationships with fellow educators, and gain new ideas. Technology is always changing today, and it is important to stay up to date on all that comes with it. This experience has helped me become more comfortable with changing technology and stepping outside of my comfort zone and learning new ways to use technology in the classroom instead of remaining old fashioned, because although it is my personal preference for learning, it may not be to my future students.