Project # 2: Progress

MY Personal Learning Network (PLN):

A Personal Learning Network is to provide a group of people and tools that can offer direction, advice and assessment of your teaching strategies. Technology has provided us, as educators, many tools that will help organize these people and tools.  Symbaloo is just one FREE option teachers can take advantage of to arrange a PLN support system.  Symbaloo seems like any easy way to virtually organize an educator’s contacts, useful websites, class blogs, and any other web resources.

However, the key term I see is “Personal”. The point of personal is to build a network system that works for you personally.  Not every educator relies on technology to organize and gather contacts. Granted, technology’s purpose is to streamline organizational tasks, I think it is important to note what is most effective for each individual educator. Not every educator will have the same set of tools or people to pull from as their experiences and personalities will differ. For me, I am a social networker IN PERSON. For me as a 33 year old, I have a group of diverse friends and families that are currently in educational fields at all levels (elementary, elementary special education, administration, Montessori and high school), experience (2 years up to 25+ years) and locations (Kentucky, Alabama, Texas, Georgia) that I can utilize. For me, I am more effective making a phone call than an email. For me, something is lost when written than when spoken. Thus, my PLN will be a phone contact list of this group of diverse educators. I will absolutely use my iPhone to organize this list!

I understand Symbaloo provides this service. I am sure there will be a day where I will require this tool and I have opened an account to familiarize myself with this tool. I do believe that even if you are not a “techie”, you must integrate some aspect of technology for organizational purposes. Given I am not of the “social media generation,” my progress is slow, but certain.  I’ll get better at using online resources to meet individuals for increasing my PLN but I believe I feel more comfortable beginning with a smaller core of seasoned educators that I have a relationship already intact. One benefit of already knowing my group of PEOPLE allows them to provide personalized advice. They know my personality and can suggest techniques and projects that would work best for me.

However, I would use online teaching resources in developing my teaching TOOLS. I like the idea of a web tool similar to the Pandora website in which the internet "suggests" additional teaching websites that  have similar "like/dislike" hits from current teaching resources (iCurio and DiscoveryEd) that I already utilize.