Journal 7 Professional Learning Networks

After signing up for many different professional learning networks, I would say the overall experience was pretty good. The Digg reader provided me with the opportunity to get articles that I would be interested in a quick and easy manner. From Digg I was able to follow many different blogs and gain a lot of resources to utilize in my classroom immediately from bloggers like, The First Grade Parade and Crazy For First Grade. The only downside to some of the bloggers I followed was when I signed up to follow them they seemed to be pretty active, but then over the course of our class some only posted once or twice. I was also able to read many different articles to help my professional development. I especially liked the article that Educational Technology and Mobile Learning would post because I found them very useful and they provided a new insight in some cases.

I also signed up and followed many people or groups on Twitter and Facebook. I liked Twitter because the people I followed were constantly posting so whenever I would check it there was always something new to see. I also liked Twitter because many of the people I followed were other first grade teachers around the country, so it was interesting to see how and what they were doing in their classrooms. On Facebook one of the main groups I followed was Edutopia. This page shared many different strategies to use in the classroom as well as educational articles.

The last group I signed up with was Classroom 2.0. This was my least favorite of the groups I joined. I was not very happy with the overall layout and navigation of the website. I felt that I had to do a lot more searching for things I wanted. I did like that it provided me with the chance to chat with other professionals every time I logged in.

Many of these tools give you the capability to find exactly what you want and there are many active users that provide very useful resources. I think it is especially helpful in finding resources and strategies to use in the classroom, as well as just reading about new things in the education field. There is also a great opportunity for some of these tools to be incorporated for students to use as well.