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"It is essential that principals and other school leaders develop professional learning networks (PLNs) both within and beyond their local organizations. Although colleagues at the local level are often generous in their offerings of support, current technologies enable school leaders to reach far beyond the walls of their schools to access the expertise of school administrators and teachers from around the world and bring a wealth of resources to their schools."

Great visual with tips and suggestions for personal learning networks.

Miguel asks the right questions!

"I see posts and videos about great educators and the great things that they're doing almost every day. And, being the self-reflective person that I am, it often makes me have the same reaction: "Wow, that's great! Look at what that teacher is doing. Look what her students have created. Look at the impact his classroom is having on the world. "Why am I not doing that? Why aren't my students doing that? Man, what kind of a teacher am I if we're not doing that?"

"The Internet has allowed us to retrieve as much information on any topic from pretty much any source we want. Wading through the junk can be tough. We have to rely on the collective knowledge of our friends and colleagues to help us sort the good from the bad. (Because remember, alone we are smart but together we are brilliant.) But that is only half of the curation process. Once we find the good we have to be able to store it and find it again. Having good tools at our disposal is crucial so that the hard work we go through to vet resources doesn't go to waste. These tools also allow us to share our learning and curated resources, adding to the global knowledge."

It has been a desired "central" lesson when I introduce Symbaloo - COllection & storage certainly, but in the curator aspect, lies evaluation and critical thinking. When I take kids to the art museum, we are looking at the concept of a "collection" - noun and those that assemble the collection are curators - what factors are considered to place an artifact in one collection as opposed to another? I admit that the curation aspect tends to become a mere add-on and gets buried under a mountain of other "stuff". But, as with all things, we endeavor to persevere...