Personal Learning Experience

               Personal learning networks are necessary resources educators should obtain to continue learning in the education field. The three accounts that I created for my PLN were Twitter, Feedly, and Classroom 2.0. All three were successful tools to expand my knowledge in the education field and to begin my PLN journey. 

            I really adore Twitter. I was one of the few in the EDUC422 class who already had a Twitter account. I made a new educational Twitter account, @emilyadlercsusm. I followed about 28 educational accounts and received an impressive fourteen followers back. I followed Education Week, MIND Research, Edutopia, and the Huffington Post Education Twitter accounts. I also followed teachers, such as Carlos Gomez Jr, Craig Gehring, Professor Chen, Lee Kolbert, and Tom Barrett. I as well followed the discussion hashtag of #ConnectedLearning where I learned a lot about technology in the classroom and different technology tools. What impressed me also were the people who wanted to follow me because my account was just made. I have a computer scientist and author of The Curiosity Cycle: Preparing Your Child for the Ongoing Technological Explosion, a neuroscience and psychologist educational science blogger, the San Diego Post, and two educator blogger and entrepreneurs following me on Twitter. MIND Research and a Forbe’s journalist on global education and game-based learning decided to follow me back too. I really enjoy my educational network that I made on Twitter. I benefit from Twitter because of its fast activity and its capability of obtaining such a large social network to make infinite connections. With the connections I made, I was able to read many influential and educational articles. I tweeted a few times and only received favorites, but no replies.

            Classroom 2.0 was new for me and I couldn’t be happier that I made an account. I feel it’s almost as if the library, Facebook, Twitter, and Google were combined in one for educational purposes. I posted a few times and have a classmate, Tracy, as one of my colleagues. It has a wide variety of different resources, groups to join, discussions, and a Learning Revolution project. I watched a video from the Beautiful Nation project called “Connecting Students to their World.” Their mission is to teach and promote global citizenship. With the current situation in South Carolina and the remarks by Donald Trump towards Mexican immigrants, and this year’s police escapade, teaching global citizenship is crucial! They take students on a boat trip and they get to experience and research different countries. It was a beautiful video presentation and I learned how this learning project is teaching young students to become good global citizens as they travel to different countries all while learning about the science and nature of the sea. 

            I really enjoyed Feedly because I felt that it was an organized YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, and library. When you type in education, Feedly provides many tools educators can read and benefit from such as the Educational NPR. I’ve always enjoyed TedTalks and I enjoy that I can find them on Feedly. In addition, I enjoy how you can search topics by hashtag as like Twitter. I can also use Feedly for my personal use beyond educational purposes. Feedly seems to have a numerous amount of research on any topic.

            My PLN has been really successful. I made amazing connections through Twitter, I have the educational encyclopedia on Classroom 2.0, and the entire encyclopedia with Feedly. I cannot complain, as I am a very happy EDUC422 student. I gained a numerous amount of educational tools for the classroom and feel that I have professionally grown as a future educator. As finding new fun ideas is always going to my mission as an educator, I am guaranteed to continue use with my PLN in my classroom.