Sunday, March 10, 2013

Journal #4 NETS 3, 4, 5


Ferguson, H. (2010). Join the Flock!. Learning & Leading with Technology, Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-leading/digitaledition/digital-edition-march-april-2013

McClintock Miller, S. (2010). Enhance your twitter experience. Learning & Leading with Technology, Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-leading/digitaledition/digital-edition-march-april-2013

Summary: The article, Join the Flock!, written by Hadley Ferguson talks about how to create a professional learning network or PLN. She mentions how to set up a free Twitter account and to always have a picture of yourself, and writing a biography about yourself in order to connect on a personal level with those who might want to follow you. You can easily follow someone else by clicking the “follow” button, then just sit back and watch the posts roll in; following is quick and easy and does not take much on your part. Ferguson even mentions several lists that are created such as #kinderchat, #edchat, or #elemchat depending on what the area of interest might be. You never have to interact with anyone and yet you still get the great resources, ideas, and educational links. If you do want to participate, all you have to do is to just re-send the tweet that someone posted to your other networks. You can even reply to a tweet with an acknowledgement of a good idea or find. There is a 140 word cap, so not much is needed to be said if you just send a link and say “check this out”. Forming a PLN and collaborating will only consume as much time as you want it to.

Summary: The other article, Enhance Your Twitter Experience, by Shannon McClintock Miller mentions a bookmarklet tool that helps to send information to others rather than sending an e-mail to someone with the possibility of the information being forward to anyone else. You just drag the information to the bookmarklet and send it to a network so that the information is shared to all. She even gives a list of common Twitter terminology that may not be familiar to users. There are two organizer tools like TweetDeck and Hootsuite to organize your lists.

Q: How is a professional learning network helpful for teachers?
A: The professional learning network enables teachers to collaborate and get different learning ideas or techniques from other teachers; having the PLN broadens the scope of learning. The PLN becomes a network of resources that you can plug into with the click of a button rather than trying to learn on your own.

Q: How can you organize the chaos of Twitter?
A: One of the tools that can be used to organize a Twitter account is through TweetDeck. With TweetDeck you can organize all of your PLNs into different columns allowing you to see what is being posted in each network rather than trying to scroll through your Twitter page to find posts from a certain network. You are able to view your educational and personal columns separately. A few other functions that the organizer allows are to be able to manage and post to several other accounts such as Facebook. It also has a tool that enables you to translate your tweets in order to collaborate with teachers of foreign countries.

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