Week 4 Reflections

My PLN is there; Is my PLN worth keeping up with?

In the past week I have worked hard to keep up with my professional network via Twitter. Unfortunately with the holiday week most people were not about to talk education.

I have two Twitter accounts to keep my personal life separate from my professional one. Maybe that is because I have been using digital social networking since its infancy, but I know that it becomes difficult to control your life on the web. Why do other professionals not see the advantages to keeping "separate lives"? Teachers in so many ways are public officials. We should treat our digital tools as means to an end. If a tool is intended for the professional line of work, keep it that way.

For example, the teacher from California who was creating DVDs for her students made a grave error. I believe these situations can be avoided by keeping separate drives of information. Even better would be to keep separate computers, but this is a stretch for most teacher salaries. If her personal files were kept on a drive separate from school work it would be much harder to mistakenly add files while creating video.

It might mean more work to set two separate systems of interaction up on the web, but the benefits far outweigh the costs. Have you ever done a search for yourself on Google or another search engine? Do you know what comes up? The revelation of your digital footprint is an important dichotomy. It is important to have a digital footprint; well in my case it is. My family requires that I move to new areas of the country quite often. As I try to find my niche in the new community, people are inclined to surf for me. Without a digital footprint, people are skeptical of my understanding. How can I claim to use technology, or have a great network, if I cannot be found on the Internet? However, do I want the new community to know what I ate for breakfast? Or that I am having a dispute with my husband? Probably not. In order to reach this inner circle of my life on the web, you need to know much more about me in order to "surf me out".

Some argue that it does not matter how you set up your interactions on the web; someone will find something to complain about. My thought is that if you have two perspectives set up, you are inclined to keep work accounts purely professional. As the spectrum of reality is skewed with digital media, it is important to keep your bearing. Remember when you swore you would never own a cell phone? I was in that category even after I joined Facebook. Times change; you adapt or get left behind.

Speaking of adapting, I have spent the last two days checking out my archived files. My classmates have all been fondly talking about bookmarks that get left for later, but never actually get used. I certainly have those too, and I wanted to look back at what I was using then for professional development and resources. It has been a very interesting few days as I canvas web pages left in the dust. Things that were up-and-coming just six months ago have been left for bigger and better network tools. On Twitter people are constantly trying to put people in touch with other professionals. There are even wikis and pages set up to try to catalogue information. It is good to participate, but I look back at the forums I was a part of two years ago. Why did I stop using those? What exactly causes parts of the digital Empire to crumble so quickly? Here are some sites that I haven't used in a while; they are still education resources that should be shared. I received each of these from my PLN as a result of a question or concern I had in the last two years.

EduHound is a site that has a wide variety of ideas, tools, and resources. It is broken up by category which can be helpful on the fly.

Awesome Clipart for Educators is something that I found helpful as I worked with elementary students. I guess it could be used as backup for those unexpected sick days, but much harder to related to content, and impractical with all the other opportunities out there with much cooler graphics.

Scitopia is a search engine that I have used when doing research for lessons or given to upper level students as a research tool. Most results are graduate level papers, but the good thing about science is that it tends to be straight-forward to a certain degree. A different way I have used this resource is to provide an example of all the work scientists are doing on a certain subject. Even third graders can appreciate all the "certifiable" results that this search engine provides. This is a tool to explain that while everything you find on the Internet is not fact, there are ways to find better facts.

Illuminations is part of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics site that provides the full range of materials on the web. I have found that sometimes I need to branch out to the other subject areas for new ideas and perspectives. Looking at a math lesson might seem irrelevant to a science class, but the integration builds great retention in students.

Now that I have recommended some sites from my past, I would like to present a "find" from my surfing in the last week. While improving my PLN on Twitter, I came across Mr. Byrne. @rmbyrne is someone I found on a random search that may provide some insight. His blog won the best resource sharing blog from Edublog Awards 2008. This is one person that I have found through my own trials and tribulations with Twitter, and I think he and his blog are a great resource!