Professional Learning Networks

Here goes my first ever big blog post. I thought that our guest speaker, John Evans, gave a very informative presentation today. He provided us with a great wiki that will be an awesome resource for helping me to infuse technology into my classroom as I (hopefully) begin my teaching career this coming September. I did not really understand how professional learning networks worked before John's presentation. I feel that one of the most important things I learned from him are the benefits that a PLN can have for a teacher, especially for a teacher like myself who will likely be teaching at a small rural school, with few colleagues in the subject area of math. So, basically a PLN removes the barrier of distance as John said.

I plan to use PLNs for two main purposes. For one, I hope to share and obtain resources for teaching and hear about other's experiences teaching. An idea I had was to possibly create a wiki through which myself and friends graduating could post our resources, lesson ideas, and even lessons plans. This way our first year of teaching may not seem as overwhelming if we work together. In a way, it would be kind of like "team teaching" a course by helping each other with activity ideas and the general organization of the course units.

Another way I hope to incorporate PLNs into my classrooms is to create a class blog where students can ask questions and help their classmates out. This could be a good way students could help each other with homework as well. A guest speaker from last term in Senior Year Math Methods gave us the idea of using a blog as a place where students could take terms posting a summary of each day's lesson. In his classroom, the students had a lot of fun with this idea as they tried to out-do their friends.

That is all for now...