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Teaching spelling and vocabulary is easy with VocabularySpellingCity! Students can study and learn their word lists using vocabulary and spelling learning activities and games. Students can take final or practice spelling and vocabulary tests right on this engaging site. Premium games and automated student record keeping are available to Premium Members.

Marbleslides are great activities that allow students to practice applying their knowledge of equations. They must create graphs that allow a launched purple ball to collect all the yellow stars.

A website where adults can go to test and practice their mental math skills. No frills, but there is a leaderboard that provides a serious challenge.

This long-term project has students creating a blog that serves as their reading response journal for the year. For this assignment, students created a blog to replace their hardcopy notebooks. As students read various things in their English class, they use this one place to do all reading activities. Once they have finished posting, they then receive time to go and comment on other people's posts. This gives students a place to practice their writing skills with an authentic audience. As the year goes on and students get more comfortable with commenting, students could end up having rich conversations based on each other's writing. I like this because it is easy to set up and use for the course of the year. This can be applied to almost any subject area. Even a math teacher could use something like this for students to summarize their learning and bounce ideas off of their peers. The functionality and utility of this project make it a must-have for educators of all subject areas.

this simple video shows a good visual breakdown of what CoP are and how they work in different scenarios, specifically in education.

This video does a nice job of quickly explaining what a COP is then she takes the time to discuss how school classrooms can be COP but also why they may not be considered a COP. She discusses how a teacher can make his/her classroom a COP if done correctly and the students are invested.

This paper not only defines a PLN and the value that can be brought to teachers through participation, but it also reviews three popular PLNs: Classroom 2.0, Edmodo, and The Educator's PLN. Lastly, it discusses design aspects that facilitate communication, sharing, and learning.

I like this article because it gives teachers like myself, a practical application of PLNs. I've heard of Edmodo and looked into using it, but not the other two (Classroom 2.0 and The Educator's PLN) resources that are discussed in the article. However, as I was researching PLNs I did come across the PLN website. I'm sure I could have found some useful information on it, but I was looking for articles that explain the theories. This is a website I need to look into further. Thank you for adding this as a resource. #EDTechSN

This website cleared up a few things about PLNs for me. It discusses how in vogue calling every meeting under the sun a "Professional Learning Community" can be for administrators, but it may just not be so. Also defined are Professional Learning Environments, "a PLE is a system that allows learners to create and manage their own online learning." This site is challenging those involved in education to build those close relationships and form true, genuine (not mandated) PLNs in order to better their practice.

Here is another blog that explains PLNs quite nicely. What I noticed about this one is that they actually discussed how it is based in the connectivism theory and got its roots from it.

I like how this article brings up that PLNs can be a form of professional development. In my time as a teacher, "professional development" has always meant meetings at school with special speakers or district leaders or other teachers giving a formal presentation. However, after reading this and other articles, I am realizing that there are so many ways I can work on my professional development outside of these formal settings.

This resource is a personal account of one teacher's usage of personal learning networks that supports the theory and nature of doing so as well as helps to create a working definition of a PLN for the reader. Additionally, this resource features how the educator used social networking to engage in personal learning networks as well as an example of overcoming the objections of skeptics to such practices.

Upon doing my research for CoP I stumbled across this site that stresses the right way to effectively use technology for online communities of practice. It emphasizes that many CoP's can lose their purpose by metamorphosing into something entirely different than what was originally intended.

This article was the study of professional learning networks and the impact they had on teachers. There were anecdotal responses given with teachers identifying specifically what had improved their practice because of the strength of their PLN. The author identified that not only is creating a PLN a skill, but it is also a mentality.

A look at how an organization shares and uses knowledge, builds collaboration and innovation by using informal communities of interest. The paper looks at characteristics of CoP's, particularly with one group, and identifies how these characteristics can be transferrable to others.