One of my PLN's that I use is Twitter. Twitter is very useful because I can connect with other educators and specifically, other speech therapists. Everyone I follow provides new information about speech pathology and I am able to learn new information everyday. These people include ASHA as well as other speech organizations. This is beneficial for me due to the fact that I plan on becoming a speech pathologist. I can find out about the newest technology and techniques being used in order to help people with speech and language disorders. My network consists of organizations, companies, parents, and educators who are all interested in or work in a department of speech. This is important to me because I can see how other people deal with speech therapy and I can learn new ideas for when I eventually enter the field.
Twitter also has a useful tool called "chats". Chats consist of groups of people who meet on twitter at a specific time to talk about a topic that interests them. On April 3rd at 12:00 p.m. I participated in an educational chat. It was called #edchat and I noticed that this is a very popular chat due to the fact that there were constantly new posts with new information popping up. There were a lot of different ideas and posts from people who also provided links to websites they had found that supported their thoughts and ideas. Many educators, principals, and other people involved in the chats were talking about different educational topics that included standards, tests and even new technology ideas for classrooms. I specifically learned that there is a large community of educators that care about thoughts and ideas of different educators. This was a gratifying experience because it shows that there are ways that people with similar interests can connect online in order to educate each other.
Another tool I find useful when looking for resources is Diigo. Diigo is a social bookmarking site that allows signed up users to bookmark and tag web pages. Additionally, users can highlight any part of the webpage and apply sticky notes to parts that may be important. Like Twitter, I like to follow Diigo users who are also interested in speech therapy. Therefore, the people I follow bookmark pages and use a lot of speech therapy and education tags. It is beneficial for me to follow these people because I could use them as resources for information and they can use my information as well. I tagged three websites with PLN. These included The Educator's PLN, Personal Learning Networks 101 as well as Wiki's in the Classroom. I tagged these with #PLN because they directly correlate with PLN's and they give great information as well as examples of what personal learning networks contain.
In addition to Twitter and Diigo, I recently became a member of the digital discussion forum Educators PLN. This website offers content that includes videos, blogs, forums, etc that discuss different aspects of education and allows educators and people interested in education to connect and share different material. While exploring Educators PLN I watched a video called "What is 21st century education?" and it involved a straight forward message that times in education have changed. Teachers have to educate students in so many different areas today then they did back before computers. It is important for educators to teach students about technology and the different tools they can use as students as well as working citizens. To view the video, click the play button on the video below.
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