Week 5: What I Learned from a 7th Grader

“Learning is personal, it has to occur one learner at a time.”  This quote resonated with me based on my experiences as a teacher.  It also makes me reflect on what learning means to me personally.  My optimal learning occurs when I have visuals, modeling, examples, plenty of practice, and constructive feedback.  Prior to my personal learning network, this occurred through a number of mediums such as professional development, interaction with coaches and mentors, conferences, collaboration, and classroom observations, and subscriptions to professional development magazines.  Occasionally there were times when I would turn to Google in search of information to questions and would bookmark noteworthy sites.  This week’s topic has really opened my eyes to other learning connections.  

Just the other day, I had a question about what personal learning networks (PLN) looked like and was interested in gaining more information about them, so I did a  so I did a search using YouTube and was thrilled by my findings!  A seventh grader amazed me with her video on her PLN and shared what I consider a very valuable tool called Symbaloo.  Symbaloo is a visual gathering tool that helps organize your PLN.  With so many new learning resources, it becomes a challenge managing all of them.  She shared another great resource called Evernote where you can highlight information, store websites, quotes, pictures, etc.  This tool will help me immensely as I try to organize highlighted information from our course readings.  Once again, YouTube is a useful resource in providing me with tutorials on how to use that tool. 

The last thing that is new to me this week is Twitter.  It’s always been a mystery to me!  I thought Twitter was mostly used by obsessed fans who want to know the happenings of their favorite celebrities.  This week I discovered that there are a plethora of accounts based on educational topics that I can follow.  I’m interested in learning more about Pod Casts since I’ve noticed them referenced frequently on our discussion board.  As you can see, reflecting on my PLN has led me to other connections that I am anxious to use, which is evidence that my PLN supports the connectivism theory.

 

Currently, the digital tool that best facilitates my learning is YouTube and TeacherTube.  These tools are conducive to how I learn and are extremely user friendly.  The digital tools I want to incorporate more of are blogs, Google Reader, as well as the tools I mentioned earlier.  I think that Symbaloo will make it easier for me to take advantage of these learning opportunities.   If a seventh grader can do it, so can I!