Saturday, August 7, 2010

The ABC's of PLN

The Educator's PLN - or Educators' Personal Learning Network - is a social networking website targeted for the teaching population. The site includes a collection of videos, forums, videos, groups, and blogs specific to the education populations. Two specific things I found within 10 minutes of being on the site are this video on Bloom's Taxonomy and a group on Google Tools for Teachers. The former video is an amusing video using various clips from the Pirates of the Caribbean movie to illustrate Bloom's Taxonomy. The latter is a user forum regarding various ways to use Google and its toolset - Google Docs, Google Apps, etc. - within education.

I anticipate this site as an excellent forum for interacting with other teachers in a collaborative fashion and brainstorming about various ideas for my classroom. In particular, I am becoming more and more convinced of the need to regularly include videos in my classroom as part of the classroom instruction. There are many great instructional videos and funny videos available on this site and on the internet, in general. Today's students love to use youtube and I intend to use these tools within my classroom on a regular basis this coming school year.

I do not view myself as very creative, but I am really good at sharing or "borrowing" good ideas from others, so a site like this is an excellent resource which will allow me to be a more effective classroom teacher.

No comments:

Post a Comment