Personal Learning Networks

I have thoroughly enjoyed building, and plan to continue building and utilizing, my PLN. I have become familiar with a number of social media tools which will only help foster my own learning as well as that of others. I have found that the compilation of blogger, rss feeds, social bookmarking, etc. are all great tools to stay connected to others and gain different insights based on what you may need and or want.
One of my favorite spots is blogger! No matter what my objective is for getting on a computer, I always check my blogs before logging off. By reading my classmates posts I have been introduced to some really educational and very informative blog sites that I will continue to navigate. I have also found myself searching for blogs based on my own hobbies, and I have gained a lot of neat information by doing so. I think blogger is great for classroom collaboration and I will encourage my students to incorporate it into their own lives, both personal and educational.

RSS feed has showed me a much easier way to keep up with everything new on the web! Before being introduced to RSS I would navigate several websites and often times have numerous ones open at once, but now everything that I need and want is coming to me using a single website. I can go to google reader and immediately have my favorite sites listed with new posts that I can scroll through...this helps me keep up! I always look for the RSS symbol on all of my most visited sites so that I can set up a connection. I find this option to be much more organized and efficient than the later!

Another tool that helps me to stay organized is social bookmarking. I used delicious to mark websites that I enjoy and I can sort them in delicious! By using tags and organizing sites by keywords I am better able to access them at a later time. One of the benefits is that I do not have to be on my own computer to access, like I would if I had a site under the favorites tab on my screen. I can share my sites with everyone and I have access to other's sites. As long as you know what you are looking for it is easy to find it and there are helpful tools to narrow your search in case too many options are available. One other feature that I enjoy is the popular bookmarks tab...if I am ever looking for something new I always go here and find something that catches my eye. Social bookmarking is yet another way to share ideas and gain knowledge.

Lastly, I will touch on websites! After learning about the many different applications available for creating websites, I have been able to use a couple of them in other courses! I completed a project and presented it in a website...this was an option available to me that I would have avoided before learning about making websites during this course. Everthing is so organized and easily accessible from ANYWHERE! I can refer back to this project without worrying about misplacing it, ruining it or storing it! I was required to have it password protected so I used google sites to accomplish this. Initially I wanted to use weebly, but needed to pay in order to create a password protected website, which I found to be a downfall to that particular creator! Either way, I am so glad I actually created a website to present the required information...it was so easy to navigate and find information when asked to do so...so many benefits to taking this route and I would have NEVER done it before this course...i would have stuck with the traditional binder...yuck!

I am so excited that I can finally say I am up to date with A LOT of the technology that's available...I just hope I can stay on top of it all without this course's guidance! I don't think I could ever abandon my personal learning network! So useful... :)