Personal Learning Network Analysis

When reflecting on my own Personal Learning Network I realized that I rely on a hodge-podge of both people and online resources to aid in my teaching and instruction. First and foremost, I rely heavily on people to enhance my teaching and to aid in lesson planning. I collaborate weekly with the other sixth grade teachers across the district after school one day a week to plan both day to day lessons and to plan big picture outlines for each quarter. Furthermore, I am the representative for my school on a literacy leadership team within the district that is in charge of making large scale decisions for language arts curriculum across the middle schools. Through this group we have integral discussions about the direction of the subject for …show more content…
For starters, I consistently utilize the Google Drive programs including Docs, Forms, Sheets, and Slides. I use this to create handouts and worksheets for students, to collaborate and share documents with other teachers and students, to assess and create surveys, and also to create presentations. I tend to use these tools a great deal with the teachers I collaborate with on a weekly basis and it is not uncommon for us to all take turns adding our own personal ideas to one document. The data team I am a part of also uses Google Drive frequently to share data findings and the sheets application to create useful working data charts. With students I use Google classroom almost daily to weekly. I started using this tool a couple years ago and have fallen in love with the capabilities and the fact that everything is conveniently located for students. My students are very familiar with logging on and going straight to classroom to find links to other websites, videos, announcements, writing assignments, and Google forms for assessments. With the Google forms and sheet I also use an “add-on” called Flubaroo that automatically grades the form for the teacher in a matter of seconds when asking multiple choice questions. This is often how I do formative assessments so that students who are not getting something can be easily identified and I can form groups immediately to …show more content…
The first area is Twitter. I have often wanted to try this particular online resource but have been too timid to do so. However, after hearing from others and listening to the lectures I am excited at the prospect of starting a page that is solely for educational purposes. I set up my account and tried my first tweet and intend to make this a gradual process. My goal for Twitter over the course of the next year is to expand those that I follow and to use this as another resource for finding materials and listening to colleagues outside of just my own district. I started by following those active in my district on Twitter including my principal, vice principal, and instructional coach that are planning on doing Twitter talks monthly next year throughout the school year. My hope is to catch some of these live sessions to learn and grow on the topics being presented. I also started following the authors of many of the books that I mentioned above that I frequently go back to or that are used often within my teaching practices. My first tweet was in reply to a book that I purchased through one of my go-to authors and now someone I follow on Twitter (pictured here). My hope is to learn more from their tweets about how to interact with their works and to see hands-on videos or examples of what these practices may look like in