Blogs

Tonight I am thinking about blogs. Recently, I taught a workshop on the many uses of blogs for teachers and for students. We created blogs using Blogger but we looked at Edublog, Wordpress, and KidBlog too. Blogger is by far the easiest to use. I find the icons and menus are so similar to those in Google Apps that the transition is seamless. Here is a link to my most recent blog: http://tahtecir.blogspot.com/. I have found that using a blog as a website or course materials repository is very effective and fun! Blogger lets you have a main blog,  comments, multiple people can post and there are endless possibilities for the "static pages" that you can make within the blog. It's a terrific platform and just perfect for the beginner blogger!

Always Something New - Blogger Interface

While facilitating an online course, recently I find the most difficult thing is to keep abreast of the changes that Google makes on an almost daily basis! I have found that I often have to Google the question or issue that I run into AND make sure that I change the search settings to 1 week, or at the most, 1 month (as recent as possible!) so that I get the most up to date results with the most recent Google version! Don't get me wrong, I love Google, Google Apps, Google Docs, all of it!!! It just needs to stay the same for a little while so I can catch up:)

Twitter - My Lesson Plan (disguised as a blog entry)

Planning an online Moodle course Using Twitter for Educators seemed like a pretty straightforward endeavor. I love using Twitter, I am a professional development provider and there are many resource out there already. Piece of cake, right? Maybe not!

I remember how I was overwhelmed by Twitter's power and scope at the beginning. I read many blogs and articles about Twitter and learned by doing, taking risks, mistyping and misstepping....I learned a lot!  Mostly, I learned that Twitter is one of today's most powerful resources that teachers have at their fingertips and I knew right away that I wanted to share this information.
My goal is to now help the participants in this online course to understand the benefits and rewards of this resource and I have decided  to use a backward design and jump right into the lesson. See below:

Lesson Objective: To teach and instill a basic understanding of Twitter as part of a teacher’s PLN in order to conduct research, social networking, establish connections and engage in collegial conversations with the ultimate goal of growing as an educator, a peer and a web 2.0 member.

Procedure: This lesson will take approximately 3 hours of time. These hours online will be spent anytime during the first week of the course and can be covered at any time of the day or night.

1. Watch Twitter in Plain English via Youtube
2. Learn about the WHY (searches & hashtags)
3. Twitter Resources
4. Sign up for Twitter! Find some people to follow

Materials:

http://www.cybraryman.com/edhashtags.html

http://twitter4teachers.pbworks.com/w/page/22554534/FrontPage

http://weconnect.pbworks.com/w/page/24134083/Twitter

Extension Activities: Explore resources related to Twitter such as Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Paper.li and others.

Now that the planning is done, I will create the Moodle page with more extensive resources and my own screencasts. I love this backward design! Thanks to all my Twitter friends!

A Personal Learning Network

What is it? How do I start one? Do I have one already? What do others’ PLNs look like? These are all essential questions and I will attempt to answer them with this post.

For an educator, a Personal Learning Network is reciprocal system of connected colleagues that you communicate with, pool information or resources with, create and learn with, and eventually share what you have discovered or learned.  

A PLN can happen in your school during faculty, grade level, district-wide or department meetings. They can take many forms such as face-to-face, online, reading or listening to a lecture at a conference. Regardless of the method of participation, a PLN is about learning, reflecting and sharing with others.

Starting your PLN is easy, you probably already have one started! I would suggest most educators begin by opening a Twitter account. You’ll want to think about your username before joining. It is often a good idea to use the same username for several social networking accounts. This helps establish your online identity as your start to connect with other educators. If you have a Facebook page, read other educator’s blogs and subscribe to RSS feeds, or belong to a Ning (see examples below), then you are already participating in your own PLN!

There are hundred of great examples of blogs, wikis, paper.li, websites, Nings, Readers, and more that we can refer to and learn from. Check out my Just in time Learning Paper.li on the right hand column for more information.

Social Media… Making Sense of Where and When

This is my initial post to the Just in Time Learning blog. In preparation, I have paused to rethink how I use Twitter, Facebook, Scoopit, etc. There are different audiences for each of my social networking applications. Knowing just which to use becomes challenging. My family and close friends are on my Facebook. With them I share check-ins, pictures, status updates and more personal information. Twitter and Linkedin are for professional contacts, updates, events and conferences, professional matters...for the most part anyway. There’s always room for some personal stuff here too! For collaborative endeavors with colleagues, planning lessons, scheduling and of course for storage, there’s Diigo and Google Apps...and more.
I plan to use this blog to discover, uncover and facilitate the use of many of these social networking tools. I invite all educators to follow, join, comment, post and connect. I am sure I will make mistakes along the way but, that’s part of learning ….isn’t it?