Group items tagged

This is another good use of a blog.  It's for second grade students and the student work has been taken down, but scope is great.  Exposing students to reflection and blogging at a young age is tremendous.  Hopefully, it starts a life-long journey of writing and reflective, critical, and creative thinking.

Gives some insight into the tools students born in the digital use everyday, and they use the tools.

Gives some insight into the tools students born in the digital use everyday, and how they use the tools.

Summary: The authors of this article clearly prove that a learner who is in control of h/her own learning will benefit the most, especially if h/she designs and navigates h/her own network. A learner will learn whether the connection is strong or weak as long as h/she has: 1) a choice in what network is joined, 2) a true passion or interest, and 3) a flexible method of communication (could be in person or via technology).

This clearly follows the belief that personalized learning is beneficial to the learner. By getting to create your PLN you are strategically picking who to network with and the topics you want to be involved in.

In this article, the discussion of personal learning networks surrounds working professionals and how they manage their professional network. The article presents a model of personal professional networking with the goal of creating a personal learning network.

This very simple slideshow highlights the key points of PLE's that have been researched and presented in many articles and experiences. The author directs your attention to the effectiveness and many facets of PLE's in the future of education, such as sharing, collaboration, reflection and storing information.

I appreciated the different way to learn about a PLN. I like the slideshow idea to interpret what a PLN is. It really grabbed my attention and the images reflected the ideas perfectly. Thank you for sharing it.

I can't say enough how much I appreciate images, they just have a way of really captivating my attention and helping my understanding. This slideshow did a nice job of highlighting key points of personal learning environments and their purpose/results. I loved that first quote by Mark Van Harmalen, such a nice way of articulating PLN's. Thanks for sharing @klauritsen

This is a student's reflection on the use of social media in a patent engineering course.  He had positive feedback and even offered a suggestion to make it easier to find other students' work.  He gave examples of what the students did in the course.

One teacher's reflections of how she has come to use technology in her ELA classroom. This includes collaborations such as wikis.

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.

What an excellent resource! 7 important things to know about PLE's? Why yes! This resource breaks down what they are, who started them/researched them, why they are significant, what is their future, their downfalls and their importance in education. This resource concisely explains PLE's and what educators need to know about them. The takeaway from this resource is that PLE's cause more reflection and deeper understanding, as well as develops student's information fluency to analyze the information presented on the internet.

This article gave an overview of what a community of practice is - but what I really like where the graphics included, especially the one on social media in the classroom - some cool statistics presented in an eye appealing manner.

I really like the visual representation at the top of this post. It shows the circular nature of communities of practice and breaks down the key ideas nicely.

Middle School students use evidence from a main text ("The Clay Marble") to explore the topis of bullying via the Collaborize Classroom platform. This is a powerful way for students to reflect and also gain perspective from their peers.

Student bloggers contribute to this general school blog and share their reflections, thoughts, projects, and work in this format. The mission statement of the blog mentions that it aims to get these students to be thoughtful and responsible social networkers. What better way than to have them actually do it!

Science students use blogs to reflect and share their research. They commented on each others' blogs and provided feedback. The students found this to be a valuable experience.

Although I'm usually a bit skeptical when reading anything commissioned by a for-profit publisher like Pearson, this survey reflects responses from almost 8000 higher ed faculty with some interesting results in the data. The faculty voices section at the end is always interesting and sometimes hard to read.

The study in the paper was interesting as it looked at K-12 educators and their use of Twitter to research, relate and form PLNs. Twitter and other social medias have allowed teachers to form networks that are specific to their needs and wants in terms of their own professional growth. In the "End of Isolation" the researchers findings touched on the fact that "over 82% of the time, the educators in this study chose to follow other educators or content experts related to their field of teaching so they were able to create a personal learning network meaningful to their professional needs." Now I just need to work with teachers at my school site to help them realize the individualized professional potential!

This study underscored the benefits of Twitter for the educational community. The article shared the advantages to new teachers in particular, where one participant stated it changed her vision and practice in the classroom. Very powerful!

Of all the resources I have read thus far on PLNs, this particular article forced me to think deeper and reconsider my interpretation of this concept. First of all, I found that the article provided a picture of the quality of interaction that can occur within Twitter. The data collected by researchers provides an in depth look at Twitter as a PLN - a feat that few other resources I have read have accomplished. By detailing the amount, quality, and type of interactions and connections, a tangible conception of a PLN emerges, even for someone who has little to no experience with Twitter. Of the 10 surveyed, a majority of their connections and tweets were professionally related. According to Nussbaum-Beach (video I posted), the difference between a PLN and a CoP is the familiarity of the people and the connection to an idea or problem. However, this study provides a different perception of a PLN that is largely professionally based with strong two-way connections. These conclusions made me wonder if it is possible for facets of a PLN on Twitter to transform into a CoP. Further, at what point can one argue that a PLN has successfully transform into a virtual CoP? Thanks for sharing. This was an excellent read!

This blog post appears to be a reflection on what the author learned during her first week in the MOOC offered by Siemens and Downes on Connectivism in 2008! I like that the author, having tackled the assigned first-week readings for the MOOC, still finds connectivism to be ambiguous. This makes me feel a little less alone, as it reflects my own opaque understanding of the theory!

This article is a guest post by a student who describes her PLN. It is an interesting self reflection about how this student realized she had a PLN without ever actively creating it. The article goes on to discuss how she developed her PLN and the major pieces that are in it.

I love that you included a student's perspective on PLN. I particularly liked her perspective on Internet Safety. My favorite quote is one we should all remember, "Common sense is a valuable thing".

Bryan, I really appreciate this article. Maybe because I can identify with Conner Wood's journey into blogging and PLNs. His revelation of a group of people he can trust thousands of miles apart connected by the Internet and his desire to meet them resonates with me. Many times I have wanted to meet my own cohorts. Wood's reflection on the quality of his selection of progressive educators is not lost on me either. His desire to opening your PLN to a variety of fields mirrors my own. "One can have a network of the top people in one's own field, but if one cannot talk to those people about anything else, what is the point?" Pinging your PLN for the "personal" as well as "learning" seems a recurring theme.

Edutopia kills it one more time with this guide for student-centered learning. As most of these guides do, it points out that there has to be infrastructure development for a program like this to work. Administrators should support teachers interested in doing this.

This paper examines the role of group learning at the university level to prepare students for interacting in CoP in the workplace. Researchers utilized Hoadley and Kilner's "C4P" framework to create an IT consultant scenario. The resulting reflections placed an emphasis on purpose, context, content, communication, and leadership.

Learning communities help to share the responsibilities of student success within a school system. Since PLNs require a shared goal, when used in a school it helps align the vision for students, teachers, and administrators. PLNs are a continuous cycle of research, planning, and implementation. They are data driven and reflected upon. Everyone within the PLN is responsible for the development and implementation of the community. When everyone participates it creates an environment of trust and expertise that can be shared equally amongst all of the members. The learning that takes place within PLNs helps to keep school systems aligned and functioning.

This was a very interesting article that really had me thinking deeper bout PLN. One specific line " Learning communities convene regularly and frequently during the workday to engage in collaborative professional learning to strengthen their practice and increase student results" really caught my eye. How does one find time for such intensive participation? Separate from that I like the idea of learning being a group responsibility and not just an individual one.

Hi Ryann, I love this article and how it chunks the topics into easy comprehension for the reader. Collective responsibility stuck out to me the most. I think this is so important whenever tackling a project as a team. The team is interdependent and I think its important for each member to take responsibility of their strengths that they bring to the table. Nice article!