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George Siemens and Stephen Downs were offering a free course to the first 2200 people to discover connectivism and study its principals. They chose a free online course format to illustrate connectivism.

I love the explanation of connectivism at the beginning. The explicitness with which they say it's not about the content but the process is refreshing and true to my experience in the classroom as well. There are many days when I know the student will never remember the content I taught but they will remember how they found it and the way that they discussed, dissected, and applied it to their selves.

I think out of all the articles I read about connectivism, this one was the easiest for me to understand and truly grasp the meaning of connectivism. The author gave clear examples of how learning happens through connectivism and that the course he was providing truly used this theory in helping the learners. This article helped me solidify how important I think schooling is for school aged children and the connections they make with their peers academically and socially. They are using this theory without even thinking about it, and in connecting with others ideas they are learning on their own without a teacher telling them facts, dates or formulas.

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 blog post describes a conference about Communities of Practice. The author considers the similarities and differences between Communities of Practice and Personal Learning Environments.

A major difference between a Community of Practice and a Professional Learning Committee is that those in the PLC are often assigned or required to be a member. CoPs seem to evolve more naturally from a desire to gain knowledge. The author of this post had just attended training given by the Wenger-Trayners--CoP gurus.

This blog post highlights communities of practice as one of the theories behind the personal learning network concept. It makes a distinction in that even though PLC's can be a community of practice, they aren't always guaranteed to be.

This curated site of "scoops" contains 20+ posts related to connectivism and online learning. A brief synopsis is linked to the original source for each post. These original sources include blog posts, wikis, videos, and summaries of conference presentations- all related to connectivism.

Blog author Steve Wheeler summarizes several writings on connectivism in this blog post. He highlights the connectivist idea that learning occurs outside the individual via social networks and PLNs. He also points to the shift in knowledge acquisition from one of "knowing information (aka memorization)" to "knowing how to locate information." He suggests it's vital that students learn to develop their own networks and personalized learning tools.

I enjoyed the quote from Siemens where he says that students need to find a method to develop their own learning tools, environment, and communities to store their knowledge. As educators, it is more important for us to guide students to find the information they require. Then coach them as to how they can store and display the knowledge they have acquired.

I found his "nutshell" comment about how connectivism argues it's more important to know where to find knowledge than it is to internalise it to be very helpful.

"Google Forms that he shares with 7th grade parents and guardians in the spring, before their student enters middle school. If parents aren't able to attend the meeting, Jeremy simply posts the survey on his school webpage for parents to access. When parents are done with the survey, Jeremy can access the results of the survey through a spreadsheet and in addition can easily view them in graphs as well."

Two more of those "C" words- helping to discern between them. The argument here is that connectivism is new, thus the misspelled word suggestion every time I type it in, whereas Constructivism is the "old" term and connectivism brings in more social media use to let people be more connected. I'll have to book mark the other blog they mention so look for that to be posted soon.

Mark, I agree with your point, although my thought is that Siemens and others associated with the theory would not discount the importance of offline interaction (traditional social constructivism) but rather highlight the new opportunities to learn that until now where being ignored in formal educational settings.

This blog talks about online education specifically science in an online environment. The blog post attached here talks about connectivism vs. constructivism. The post runs through how both of these learning theories discuss how students learn. The blog then goes into his takes on constructivism and connectivism.

You can now stand out from the crowd and engage your followers with eye-catching Posts. Oh, and did we say it's free?

This project has students using Instagram to post pictures that are related to the book they are reading. For this project, students were asked to select one line from the first two chapters of the book they were reading. They were asked to find a picture somewhere around their school that related to the line they selected and take a selfie with it as well. The final step was to post their picture with their quote as the caption using the classes hashtag. I like this assignment because students can select whatever part of the reading speaks to them the most and find a way to represent this visually. This pushes students to look deeper into what they are reading. Additionally, time can be spent looking at other posts made by other students and further depth can be added to the novel. This is a quick and easy task that can be done every few chapters for any novel. I could see myself using this project to supplement the reading being done in my class.

Dr. Sherri E. Ritter's blog post discusses the main ideas behind several learning theories. She also provides background information, a definition, and examples of connectivism. I like how Ritter suggests different apps at the bottom of the post to support connectivism in the classroom. I have used Remind101 before to safely and securely communicate with parents.

What I find most interesting about this is that there are examples of how apps are used in the day to day operation of businesses and educations and yet in most classrooms I've been in the first thing we're told is to turn off our electronic devices. In fact, in the school where I work, we just reconfigured a classroom because it was too hard to tell if students were surfing the web instead of paying attention. Did I mention that I teach adults?

Great connectivism resources for users in a variety of different backgrounds.

Students from Ashwaubenon High School in Wisconsin created a video about the dangers of texting and driving and shared it with others by posting it on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. The project helped to increase awareness of the dangers of texting and driving through social media that students are using everyday anyway.

After reading a book or covering a topic in class, create a Facebook page for a character or a fan page for a cause that you read about. You can personalize the Facebook page, like other "peoples" pages and participate in "online discussions" that these people could have had if Facebook had been around at that time.

This blog post outlines an assignment in which students must create a Facebook page for a literary character.  This is a great idea.

There were many great project ideas on this side but to get to the one I want you to look at scroll down to "Social Mobility" audio blogging. The group audio blogging activity had the student compare and then post their results using a VoiceThread. They were able to combine visual and recorded media and they had to think carefully about what they wanted to record.

This student blog is an excellent example of active learning and sharing that learning with others. The author shares what she is learning, her reflections, and leaves a positive digital footprint that will really benefit her. Comments are enabled and she posts commenting guidelines to ensure good netiquette is followed.

This is an article about using Worlde as a tool in class. It isn't really used in social networking, but I think it could easily be tweeted or posted as an update on Facebook. The power is in the words and analysis of the rhetorical features in the words.

This blog has an entry titled: "Building School-Based Social Networks for Inquiry, in which he discusses building a social network for students named "Youth Voices." This site is for students to write and respond to each other and teach the value of peer interaction. The process of responding to each other has motivated student begin new posts.

Great use of Twitter in a 3rd grade classroom. Students tweet concise summaries, but the class also follows discovery education on Twitter to stream videos that DE links to in it's Twitter posts. I love Twitter as both a discussion/summary forum and a resource for materials.