Personal Learning Network

Twitter

I am not a “Tech Person” and I engage in limited online social network activities. I do have a facebook account; however, I only log on my account once a while to check out new posts and pictures from my friends and family. As for the requirement of my Technology classwork, I created a twitter account and I followed some education-related people or organizations. This whole process was totally new to me and I discovered there were a great numbers of educators connected on Twitter.  Since I was new to Twitter, I first picked the teacher in my technology class to follow, and then I browsed her following list and picked some people and organizations that related to education to follow. I am following 28 educators and educational organizations and I found many useful resources bombard to my twitter page every day. I do not have time check out all the resource link one by one. Yet, I do find some very  good resources through twitter.

          ThingLink
        One of the resources I find useful is posted by Susan Oxnevad on the “ThingLink Blog”. On the blog post, Susan provides step by step guide for teachers to build a ThingLink classroom. I also found that there are resourceful posts on the blog. I think that is very cool because I really want to use more technology in my future classroom to enhance students’ learning. This resource really can give me more ideas and knowledge to incorporate technology in my further teaching.  I definitely will visit this blog and follow Susan’s twitter posts to learn more technology knowledge.  

          PLN's on Twitter

Besides following some educators and educational organizations, I also learned how to retweet some useful resources via my twitter account and participate in an #Edchat. However, I made a mistake in my first live #Edchat. In order to participate in a live chat, I searched the live chat schedule. I realized there were so many live chats in different topics during the day. I spent quite amount of time to find the right #Edchat for myself to take part in. I finally found one was suit for my interest and time to join, it was on Monday 8:00pm. Yet, I did not aware of the time zone and I just could say “hi” before the live chat was over. Since the schedule which showed on Twubs indicated “your time 8:00pm-9:00pm”; therefore, I assumed there was no time difference and I missed the chat.

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As I have the previous experience, I chose another live chat schedule very carefully, and I joined #ndedchat yesterday. It was a live chat for educators to share their experiences and opinions. The topic of the live chat yesterday was teacher evaluation. Since it was my first time, I did not have much to share. I actually kind of lost in the beginning. The pace was very fast and I was very busy to follow the conversations. I also had no cues some terms they used, such as “Ts” “Ss”, “PD” and “ND”. Moreover, they mentioned about “The Marzano model”, I also had no idea what was that looked like. I found myself was so unprofessional and lack of knowledge in the conversation. However, I still tried to participate in the conversation and I found that I did learn something about how teachers would be evaluated and what they wanted to be evaluated. Even though my first #Edchat experience was a bit frustrated, I think I should make good use of PLN’s on Twitter to equip myself to be a professional educator. And I hope that I am not only get the resources from this network, I also can have contribution as well. 

Link of Susan Oxnevad's ThingLink Blog post