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Blog Post 5

What is Personal Learning Networks (PLN)?  -  Personal Learning Networks (PLN's) are money-making resources for teachers to grow skillfully. Individually PLN is created and personalized based on the professional interests and goals of an individual educator. This is a free means of professional development available 24/7 from anywhere.

How can they help us as teachers? As we carry on into 21st century education system, teachers must acquire new techniques and practices to better ourselves and to prepare our students for our constantly evolving world.  One way to do this is through a Personal Learning Network (PLN), a network of people, websites, blogs, and other resources. Vicki Davis best explains how PLNs can work in the classroom in her article "Personal Learning Networks Are Virtual Lockers for School kids": "A PLN becomes a student's virtual locker, and its content changes based on the student's current course work. When I assign them a term paper, the students comb the Web to sign up for information that will feed into their personalized Web page to construct a PLN for that topic. When they get a new project, they assemble another page."

How are they made? How can you create your own PLN?

Dr. Strange has stated before that Twitter is best way for him to connect with other educators and resources. He has also provided a list of many educators in Project 6 Fall of 2009. Once you discover new resources to include in your PLN, you can use websites like Symbaloo or Netvibes to form and keep track of your PLN resources. Symbaloo organizes different website icons by tile blocks, while Netvibes organizes RSS feeds of sites into block arrangements. Both are effective tools and easy to use.

Who will be the first additions to your PLN?

 I am a little to have begun to build my own PLN, but I have planned to add Dr. Strange, friends and classmates to my network through Twitter.

Blog post 4

  After reading these articles I have learned a lot about how to ask questions and what questions to ask. The first article I read was” Three Ways To Ask Better Questions in the Classroom”. In his blog post "The Right Way to Ask Questions in the Classroom," Ben Johnson asks why teachers ask questions in the first place. As he says, "What does a teacher asking questions of a class expect the class to learn from the questioning method?" First, we must prepare questions while we are creating or writing lecture it is crucial that we do this so that we are prepared to ask important questions that relate directly to the content of out speech. Next, we are to be sure to engage our students in the question asking process, by maybe leaving the question unanswered.  Lastly, this article states that we must save good questions. Good questions help students to see the importance of questions and how they make us think. The best questions of all are those we cannot answer.

  We must remember that as teachers we do not know everything, as stated in The Right Way to Ask Questions in the Classroom this article taught me that questions to check understanding benefit the teacher more than the student, for instance some students might say that they understand when they really do not. Instead of asking if everyone understands, ask specific questions about the content taught but avoid questions that require a simple fact as answerWe will always have those students that keep quiet and count on the smarter students to answer the questions for them. Including every student in the question process will help everyone in the end.

  Asking Questions to Improve Learning was most helpful in my opinion. This article tells us to keep our course goals in mind as we ask questions. We must keep them in mind if we want our students to major core ideas and critical thinking skills. We must avoid questions that answer themselves this does not allow students to think of their own answers.

 

Blog Post #3

    What is Peer Editing? Peer editing can be a self-confidence builder to those writers who are insecure about their own writing. You are likely to find that others' first drafts are not so great either, and you'll find out how much you can actually benefit other writers with your own helpful opinion.  As Lucy Calkins (1983) states, part of being a good writer is being able to give valuable feedback to other writers. Peer response and editing helps students.  Adriana Zardini also defines editing as "making suggestions, compliments, and changes to writing," as shown in her slideshow "Peer Edit with Perfection Tutorial". 

   Peer editing is done so all students can improve their grammar, editing, and writing skills. Peer editing can be chancy when someone is too serious and or too defensive, as shown in the video "Writing Peer Review Top 10 Mistakes" created by Tim Bedley. It brought up a lot of interesting points and was pretty funny considering the age of the children. The point of the video was that all the students must keep constructive and positive attitudes during peer editing reviews in order to learn from another person’s peer editing. The overall goal of peer editing is to help students work more efficiently. We always need to remember to leave compliments, suggestions, and suggest corrections that are not to critical, but helpful.

Blog Post #2

What Will Teaching in the 21st Century Be Like?

"Mr. Dancealot"

   Every course has its different conducts of teaching techniques that are suitable for the subject being taught so that students can easily understand the subject being taught to them and if not shown fittingly it can be a complete catastrophe, as presented in the video "Mr. Dancealot". Learning to dance cannot be shown merely by lecture, but instead a student must actually dance in order to learn. There must be effective teaching methods in order for students to be successful and proficient in a course. I partially agree with his conclusion because I want my own students to learn in the best possible way that they can, but i understand that every student learns differently. Teaching methods may need to be changed over time with the way technology is sky rocketing on being more viral in teaching online.  I think the question with the way the world is going should be "Will there be classrooms in twenty so years from now?" Only time will tell.

"Teaching in the 21st Century"

"The Networked Student,"

    A student can acquire what he or she needs by being linked to many different technological tools. Examples include searching for sources with Google Scholar, bookmarking sources with Delicious, listening to professor's podcasts on iTunes U, chatting with experts on a subject through Skype, and many more mentioned throughout the video and I am sure many more we have yet to hear about. In the video "The Networked Student,” uploaded by Wendy Drexler sets forward that the best way for a student in the 21st century to learn is by a theory called connectivism. The teacher in charge educates and helps the student in just how to take benefit off these opportunities and build his or her connection network. I agree with Drexler's position as far as the student is connected to more sources than ever before and therefore is able to create a better research project . However, the teacher should also teach on the subject taught in addition to teaching how to build a network because I believe some students could struggle in that area. Meeting in an in-class setting might would help solve that. I still believe is still the most effective in some cases. 

"Harness Your Students' Digital Smarts,"

  In the video "Harness Your Students' Digital Smarts" uploaded by Vicki Davis on the Edutopia webpage is arguing that teaching kids in a more technological way in a group based way is an efficient way to teach. She also stated teaching this way is beneficial to her teaching the students and also learning from the students because their young curious minds explore different options. Vicki Davis practices technology to link her students to other students around the world and to different cultures which is very interesting and in my mind very productive in spreading new ideas and learning others opinion. I like what she is doing a strongly support it based on the video she presented.

"Who's Ahead in the Learning Race"

It is pretty clear from the video "Who's Ahead in the Learning Race" by Dr. Strange that elementary school students in Baldwin County are far ahead of undergraduate and graduate students in using Macbooks and iPads for learning purposes. I know growing up we had none of that and it for the younger generation that have practically grown up with technology constantly around them. Our generation is adapting and learning to use today’s technological advances and it a struggle for most of us but we will continue to improve. I know for myself I usually pick up quickly to sports and technology so it has not been a difficult transition for me. I find it quite overwhelming that these kids are so far ahead of us. 

"Bringing the Locker Room into the Classroom"

As to be a future educator and coach I believe all sports help teach a lesson of teamwork and honesty that is hard to teach. It is something you do and feel. Involving team based activities is a good way to do it and comparing sports to give a general idea.