Looking through Ning, MACUL, and ISTE these professional learning networks seem like a good idea but too advanced for me right now. It is challenging to manage these new opportunities and right now a smaller contact domain seems more likely to serve my needs. When I set up my wiki I created a contact point for the Spanish secondary teachers in my district. My first focus will be to use this as a meaningful meeting point to blend our experiences adopting our new textbook. After I become more adept at this starting point for professional collaboration it seems more likely that I will be more adventurous to pursue a broader range of topics to enhance my professional development. Good idea; back burner for now until I become more adept at my current new technology lessons.
That being said, I did find a Ning resource that has piqued my curiosity. When I was searching sites I found www.nos-ayudamos.com ("Let's help each other") which is a question/answer site for those learning English and Spanish. I spent quite a bit of time reading through the questions and the contributed answers. I myself often am asking my colleagues for content help and this site significantly broadens the number of "colleagues" that can help answer my questions. I knew that sites like this probably existed and I am excited to continue to find similar resources.
Finally, this class has been a wonderful and eye-opening experience showing me many benefits available from these constantly changing and advancing technologies. This has a been a valued hands-on introduction not only to new technologies but to new ways to share and to create content that I can use to interact with peers, students, and even the world at large. This course has made me aware that I need to continue to find the new advances that are coming in the Web 2.0 world. There is so much here in these 23 Things that I knew little to nothing about and now I have a google e-mail account complete with a blog, I am using Picassa for my photos, I started a wiki, I am receiving daily RSS feeds, and I have visited more valuable sites than I can currently comprehend. What a month! As I continue on this learning curve, I am now aware that there is so much out there in cyber world that will be of great use to me. I need to learn how to access it and eventually I imagine that these PLNs will be my means to learning more, to having skilled users share new technologies of use to my instruction and to my classes. It is comforting to know that this is potential is waiting for me.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment