The newest thing I have learned is social bookmarking. I was introduced to this concept years ago in an undergrad course I had taken but never really paid much attention to it unfortunately. In my online class we were shown how to utilize the website Diigo. I can not express how wonderful and easy this site it to use. I have not only used it in my personal life but an using it for my own education. I plan to transition into using this in my classroom with my students.
What does social bookmarking do? The site allows you to bookmark any website of your choice. Then you can organize all of your sites but labeling them with key words. For example I am currently planning my wedding. I have several different sites tagged relating to cakes, bridesmaid dresses, flower, etc. This site them allows me to give a brief description about the site. I can quickly read my description and remember why I tagged the page.
For school purposes this can be an amazing tool. It allows you to highlight and add sticky notes on the site. Such a wonderful tool, rather then adding the site to my favorites list and then going back even a couple hours later and having to reread the entire page to find the useful information, I can now find it quickly by looking for my highlights. I can also organize articles relating to specific topics like spelling, math, etc.
How to use this in the classroom...well I am an early childhood teacher so one of my concerns is making sure that my students are looking at appropriate things online. I can create an account on Diigo for my students to all have access. If you had older students who could handle each having a Diigo account then you can just create a group for the students to all join so the can share sites with one another. With my younger students who are studying a specific topic. I would go and tag sites that are relevant and appropriate for the topic we are discussing. Each student would then go and explore the sites I have found and highlight important ideas. They can also had sticky notes with questions or other interesting facts they know about the topic. As the teacher I can monitor what students are highlighting and see what they are discussing with each other. I can base my instruction around this information.
Links to help...
http://www.onestopenglish.com/support/tech-tools-for-teachers/social-bookmarking/
http://morethanatech.com/2013/01/17/social-bookmarking/
http://community.educationworld.com/content/3-must-see-social-bookmarking-sites-educators
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Personal Learning Networks (PLN)
What is it? I define a PLN as how a person
gains knowledge from their interactions with others throughout their daily routines.
A person interacts and makes connections with the others around them for a
reason. For example someone who wants to learn about growing tomatoes could go
chat with a local gardener at a home improvement store, or search the web for a
blog on the topic, or tweet the question they have regarding the topic. Wikipedia defines a PLN as “an informal learning network that consists of the people a learner interacts
with and derives knowledge from in a personal learning environment. In a PLN, a person makes a connection with another person
with the specific intent that some type of learning will occur because of that
connection.” (2013)
Why is this important? As
a teacher it is very important to develop your professional skills and collaborate
with other educators. Creating a good personal learning network helps you stay
current with the best teaching practices and allows you to gain feedback from
other in your field. Several sites have
already been created for educators to use in their PLN. Students have so many networks these days, we can show them how to gain useful knowledge from them and connect with experts in topics of interest.
How can we utilize this in k-12
classrooms? Students can
benefit so much from having a personal learning network. Twitter is resource that
all students should utilize to strengthen their networks. In my own classroom I could use twitter to
post resources for my students. I can use it to also communicate easily with
parents and keep them informed on what it going on in the classroom. In our
reading for this week a teacher created a board in her class to look like the
twitter site, and had student hand write “posts” about what books they
recommend others read. This allows every student to have a voice. In a traditional
setting not every student participates in discussions. This can be cause by a
student being shy or just not having enough time for everyone to talk out loud.
Another way this can be used in the classroom
is by posting an opened ended question relating to a topic being discussed in
the class, and having the students shares their thoughts. A teacher can use
this to help guide instruction, you can see how students are thinking and maybe
what you need to address again for better understanding. Students can also
explore and dig deeper themselves on a topic. Say you are discussing weather
patterns found in the US. Twitter can allow student in Ohio to chat with
students in Alaska and discuss how the weather is different and the same. The
teacher is giving more responsibility to the student. Students learn how to connect with others and
contribute their knowledge while gaining knowledge.
If you want more information about this topic check out
these sites:
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