Personal Learning Network (PLN)

My personal learning network is influenced by peers, professors or teachers, online, education technology tools and social media.

My social media presence is quite lacking, as noted from the Digital Learning post, but I am still trying to get on them. I currently have Snapchat and Twitter. I could use Snapchat as a future educator because me and other teachers could use as form of communication to discuss ideas and ask questions. On twitter I can take this questioning and idea discussion to broader global setting because I can connect with other educators across the world. Bringing in all these new ideas will help me broaden my views by allowing me learn new ideas.

Using twitter and Snapchat is also great way to connect with my peers, who are influencing my learning network as well. My peers are my family, friends and other classmates who I can talk to about education and possible get help in education courses. Learning with peers in education classes helps me to become educator as well as my peers because we are exchanging ideas and views that can help us. Having close fiends who know what I am studying, can act as a emotional support when having a rough day and help me carry on. Having cousins who are teachers act as my peers because I can look to them for personal experience and ask them some do’s and don’ts in the first year teaching.

Having professors and teachers in my learning network helps me to see good and bad educators and also gaining types and advice helps as well. Some of cousins are like this and others teachers or professors are ones I meet from going to school. Going to a small catholic school, helped me to have strong connection my teachers because we all learned more about each other forming on good bond between student and teacher. This is helping me in becoming a future educator because I am able to go back to the school and I am able to do observation in the classroom, such as in a kindergarten classroom. This helps to be exposed in a friendly learning environment. I have had many professors in college who have inspired me and those are mainly the ones who got to know me for who I am and sometimes are the professors or adviser that helped me in my course work to strive to be a good and hard-working student.

Some of classes help me learn how to use technology in the classroom because it essential to learning this because many of the students are “hiers” in technology (Digital Native vs. Digital Immigrant Post). Just learning about different educational technology tools was immensely helpful because it taught me different ways to incorporate technology in the classroom. I learned about flipgrid which can help as a future educator because it will hep in creating and finding lessons to be used online in a fun and new exciting way.

With the world in a tech crazy society it is very important to know how use the online or internet to help benefit me so I know how to find information and sources to be used either as a college student or as a future educator. This information can include finding educational related blogs or articles on this subject matter. To start all searches Google is great place to start and even better Google scholar for more peer-reviewed articles.

As I continue my education path my PLN is always going to be constantly changing and making new connections as I grow in my learning for becoming a elementary teacher.