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Providing educators and students access to the highest quality practices and resources in reading and language arts instruction.

Listen to foreign online radio news and information and practice a foreign language!

Great way for kids to practice using a variety of activities.

Study anything for free. Even has a Quizlet app for iPad, iPhone, and iTouch. This is a great program for teachers or for students to create their own quiz as part of a larger project.

Simple and easy flashcard tool for students. They can build their own list, access teacher lists, or find pre-made lists to study and play games with.

Here is a list of my resources that I found for this assignment. I put my summaries in the descriptions.

Learning communities need to be intentional; students must form with each other deeper understandings; gives students more control over their learning environment

This Pinterest page is more of a menu of materials associated with Personal Learning Networks.  Numerous links to PLN resources are provided.

Pinterest is awesome, except for the fact that it is a total time sucker. At least I get some good ideas for my classroom and recipes for dinner from it. I also posted this link because it had quite a few websites that talked about PLN's. I'm new to PLN's but I am certainly learning a lot more about them this week.

I wondered if anyone would find something on Pinterest. One of the articles that I read mentions the idea of framing, or putting a personal interpretation on someone else's material. Pinterest is a classic example of this. Without framing, though, I don't think we would all see the value in what others pin.

This article really helped to define knowledge in the Connectivist theory. To know something, means that you are able to organize and connect ideas together. The author makes a brilliant point that the more connections you have to the idea, the stronger your knowledge of it is. It also states that it is more important to continue to search for more knowledge and connections than it is to be satisfied with what is currently known.

This article discusses different learning theories. One of the theories was network semantics and connective learning. This section describes what it means to be a network. Then it connects networks to what it means to be connective.

After reading this article I can get my head around how important PLN are and I applied it to my corporate job. Both my peers and the people who report to me connect in many ways.

Mostly poses questions about learning networks, and how technology tools and context influence learning. An intriguing notion of comparing the wisdom of a crowd with the stupidity of the mob is presented, but hardly explored.

Very nice slideshow. The author touches on communities of practice, connectivism and PLNs all at once. On a slightly different note, I simultaneously find Slideshare stimulating and frustrating. It is frustrating because of its one dimensional nature. Too bad there isn't a way to hear and/or see the speaker too.

Discussion by one of the founders of connectivism, Stephen Downes. A thorough explanation of some cautions to be heeded by individuals within a network, like resisting the pull to jump to conclusions. Groups should be connected but not cave to any assumptions as those will naturally ebb and flow. Part of that flexibility is staying open to a diverse community in order to be open to information.

The idea of interpretation is to compile our own knowledge, not directly, but by how we gauge what is happening. Emergence is the result of this interpretation, but is not always correct! Social knowledge comes out of what we can term a community of practice. An example is given of the price of wheat being dependent upon the many wheat buyers that are part of that community.

Learning Networks in Practice paper by Stephen Downes regarding personal learning environments, learning in communities, content creation and context.

This article talks about the beginning of the PLN movement in education. It discusses how a good PLN makes use of the WEB 2.0 applications that are out in cyberspace.

This is a study guide website that includes flashcards, study guides, tutors, and videos. It seems to have a lot of options to help students study.

This paper, by Ana Maria Marhan examines connectivism and social media. The author points out that because today's learning is a "messy, nebulous, informal, chaotic process, we need to rethink how we design our instruction. This hit home because I just moved to a new state and a new district, and they are very strict with, well, just about everything on the computer! I teach at a Title 1 high school, and these kids would truly benefit from instruction that wasn't so linear. These learners (like all learners) form their own pathways of knowledge, and I believe I could make a stronger impact on them if I could use more tools.

Marhan, A. M. (2006). Connectivism: Concepts and Principles for emerging Learning Networks. In The 1 st Conference on Virtual Learning. In this article author, Ana-Maria Marhan does a good job exploring the principals pushing forward Connectivism as a pedagogical helper. This becomes apparent right from her abstract "Connectivism views learning as a network creation process, and looks at how we might provide 'learning ecologies' to meet the learners' needs.". In her first section, she defines learning as "a persisting change in human performance or performance potential which must come about as a result of the learner's experience and interaction with the world." As soon as I read the last few words "interaction with the world", I began to connect the dots (no pun intended) to what I've read thus far about communities of practice. She spreads out on a handful of relevant and interesting subtopics to the overall theme of Connectivism. After she describes more about the new connected and growing world we live in she tackles the basics of Connectivism as a theory of learning and the principals behind it. Again like other articles she echoes many of the same sentiments George Siemens made when he originally proposed the learning theory. After the background on Siemens theory, she begins to draw everything together. One statement that I enjoyed was "Individual is the starting point of Connectivism: personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into communities, organizations or institutions, which in turn feed back into the network and then continue to provide learning to individual". She does a great job of supporting the use of technology not as the new power of learning but as a tool to unlock that power. "When knowledge, however, is needed but not known, the ability to plug into sources to meet the requirements becomes a vital skill".

I also appreciate how Marhan suggests that connected learning is cyclical: "Individual is the starting point of Connectivism: personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into communities, organizations or institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to individual."

This is a fantastic resource to learn more about CoPs, particularly if you are considering forming one. It provides basic info and background about CoPs, but also provides a few examples, and also concludes with some links to external Websites where you can see additional examples of live CoPs.

Here is a great source for extra practice for implementing spreadsheets in a mathematics classroom.

Researchers believe that video enhances student motivation and that video use in instruction should be common practice

I enjoyed this teacher's approach to using video in the classroom.