How do you currently network and learn about teaching resources?  What have you learned from reading and watching the resources provided?  What will you do to expand your PLN?

There is so much information available on the internet that people have begun to express their frustration through humor by creating new words like intronet, worldnet, or interweb.  You Tube and Facebook were romanticized on a national sitcom when an obvious digital immigrant lamented seeing his picture on “The Face Tube.“  LOL!   Many teachers are equally as dumbfounded by technology as the general public.  There are so many ideas to use out there, that many of them go unnoticed, in spite of their merits. 

A Personal Learning Network is one way to help teachers organize, utilize and proselytize the benefits of engaging kids through electronics. 

Currently,  my educational networking capacity includes interaction with the staff of my school through email and professional development, and more recently, Edmodo.   There is so much useful information available through the worldwide web it is hard to recognize what would be useful.  I thought of the following funnel analogy. 

A funnel is a device that allows the use to control the flow of liquids into a small opening.  A funnel prevents waste and saves time and money.   Having a funnel around can also offer peace of mind.  What do you do when you can’t find your funnel? You buy another one, or you ask your neighbor if you can borrow their funnel.  If your neighbor is not home, you give up and watch football or a movie. Sunday’s are for resting anyway, you convince yourself. 

How can we teachers funnel what tools we want to use from the web and put them to use efficaciously?  Perhaps that frustration is what many educators experience when they begin to think about ways they can utilize the many wonderful resources such as Facebook, You Tube, Pinterest, and others to help students become engaged.  Think of all the resources available as the fluid from a vast ocean that you want to pour into a small opening, recognizing that you need only so much and too much would be wasteful, or  perhaps you don’t have time to decipher through all the information.  A Personal Learning Network, [PLN], is a good way to funnel all the resources available in that vast sea of  of information known as the world wide web, a container of sorts for educational tools.

In my current practice as a middle school teacher, I rely on what I learn about technology through professional development and the testimony of other teachers.  I have a couple of blogs for students, which I share with my cohort in the masters of education classes I am taking at the University of Hawai’I at Manoa.   This is an exciting beginning and has opened my eyes to a ton of possibilities.  I really want to use technology in school and I so look forward to implementing all that I am learning about engagement with the use of electronics.  Following are some of the ways I plan to use what I have learned.

1^st.  In the new paradigm shift of flipping the classroom, Twitter can be a useful tool.  Teachers are using Twitter to write their Do Now lessons on their own devices.  I have seven beautiful screens in my room which are not being used but most would be happy to use them for a change of pace from their tablets.   Fundamentally, I don’t get Twitter, but I can see how useful it could be.  I could Tweet a vocabulary word a day, or a link to a poem.  I could Tweet my thoughts about the extended metaphors of bowling and seafaring in Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, how his life as a World War II pilot surely found its way into the adventures of James Henry Trotter and his menagerie of super-insect friends.   I can imagine myself relishing each response and holding my smartphone as though it were a gold medal or a scepter of truth, the way I do when I hear from an old friend on Facebook or the way I used to feel when I got letters from my high school friends over the summer, reading them over and over again.            

2^nd   Beyond flipping the classroom, I saw the idea of Pinterest and Facebook as tools to share really great ideas and useful practices.  I can like a Pinterest item that is shared on Facebook and Twitter instantaneously and others will like it and sort of  “pay it forward.”  Edmodo is another great source of funneling information.  It’s like Twitter without the character limit.  Teachers can share ideas and links and blogs and decipher whether any new information will have impact on their current practice.