Post 7: Professional Learning Network

Before starting this course I intermittently used professional learning networks to quickly find lesson ideas and resources. Since discussing PLNs in class I have expanded my horizon from Pinterest and Teacher Pay Teacher to Twitter and Digg.

Digg I admittedly used far less than Twitter. When we first signed up for our Digg account I selected 3 different teacher blogs to follow. The information ranged from “How to make parents love you” to “fluency that is not teacher directed.” One of the blogs however went cold until literally today! Her last post previous to todays was in August. This was one of my reservations about using an RSS feed, I was not sure if the people I initially chose to follow were worth following. I noticed that this particular blog had gone cold but as a teacher I don’t have time to continually search for new blogs or teachers to follow.   

This is where Twitter was able to fill the void of less desirable RSS features and in my opinion become the superior PLN. Twitter is convenient, easy to use, constantly being updated, plus I can get quick responses from teachers across the globe on how to teach a certain topic. I was really struggling to find an alternate way to teach long division so I put a question out with the hashtag #mathchat and #edutech and got a response within the hour. Twitter is easy to search not only for news (which came in handy this political season) and sports (also can now watch live games via twitter), but also for specific teaching topics like 4th grade missions, long division, and writing prompts. I can get my personal news, social networking, and teacher resources all in one place!

Questions:

Q1: Do I see myself using PLNs after this class is over?

A1: As a teacher I can see the benefits of having a PLN that you like using on hand. For me this will continue to be Twitter. I have found it extremely convenient and easy to use. The great thing is that students can use it too! While my students are a little young for their own accounts I have brought twitter into the classroom in other ways like using tweets as tickets to leave and creating faux accounts for historians and tweeting from their perspective.

Q2: Do teachers need a variety of PLNs or should they just use one?

A2: I think it is extremely important for teachers to use as many resources as they can because there are so many options out there. Yes I have my favorites (twitter, tpt, and pinterest) but I am always keeping my eyes and ears open for new resources to tap into. Just like my students, we all learn in different ways. I say use what works best for you but keep an open mind when something new comes along. Being a teacher means being a lifelong learner. Don’t stick with the same boring lessons when you can easily tap into your PLN to find new ideas.   

Journal 6: Self Reflection

I began teaching 4 years ago and quickly realized that as a teacher having your own website is not a requirement but it is encouraged. Even though I considered myself a tech enthusiast I had no idea how to code my own site; so of course I searched online for a free hosting site that would basically build a website for me. Weebly has been wonderful for quickly building and hosting my website for free. However, there are limits to customization and other layout design (which I now know comes from a cascading style sheet). Fast-forward to today and you can imagine my excitement when I realized I would be taking a web design class in my very first quarter of my masters program! 

GED 512 has been a wonderfully frustrating and enlightening experience thus far.  It has truly made me appreciate the ease of use and design of the websites that I frequent on a daily basis. It has also brought light to the once foreign language of HTML and CSS coding. It amazes me that I can look at a site’s code now and actually understand what the various HTML tags mean and what CSS markups are controlling the appearance of the page

I was able to put my new skills to use just this past week when my colleagues and I were trying to customize a prebuild online math test. We did not like the wording of the question or the multiple choice answers so I was able to go in, look at the HTML code, and change it to fit our needs in a matter of minutes. I felt so accomplished! Lol This same feeling came to me after I completed exercises 6.1-6.7. Although it took a few attempts to correctly link all of the pages together, I found this exercise to be the most rewarding because I know I will be using this skill in my future classroom sites/assignments.

On the other hand the most challenging assignment for me has definitely been linking all of the book assignments to book.html and moving them to the remote server. I have definitely learned the importance of naming files as well as keeping my files organized in a meaningful way so I don’t feel the compulsion to go back and reorganize them again later (I am sure you can imagine my frustration when finding all of my links broken after moving one file).

Overall it has been a rewarding experience thus far and I am looking forward to learning more in the upcoming weeks.

Questions:

Q1: Do you really need to know how to code?

A1: Having a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS coding is an invaluable skill that will come in handy when working in/with technology. I try to teach this to my students by using Hour of Code since so many of their future career opportunities will probably deal in part with using technology. Research shows that there will be 1,000,000 more computer science jobs than students by 2020.

Q2: Will I continue to use hosting platforms for my websites?

A2: I think I will, at least for now, due to the ease of use. Because I am still learning HTML and CSS markups it takes me a considerable amount of time to code a single webpage.