What the heck is a Personal Learning Network?

When in doubt, ask the internet: "personal learning network -- a group of people who can guide your learning, point you to learning opportunities, answer your questions, and give you the benefit of their own knowledge and experience." That's according to Daniel R. Tobin, Ph.D. from http://www.tobincls.com/learningnetwork.htm. Not sure if this website is authentic or if it's a consultant trying to sell things, but it's a definition that fits with what we've learned in class.

So what it boils down to is that all of you classmates are my personal learning network. How do I feel about it? Glad to have you as teachers. I expect to learn more from all of you guys than I could by myself. My main question for this course, is how do I use this stuff in class? It's one thing to be Clarence Fisher and have kids read about a Global Voices blog for a Social Studies class. That seems logical. But how about EAP Math/Science?

CureMySoreBack.com

While listening to Chris Betcher's presentation about evaluating the authenticity of websites, I realized how much of my own evaluation is based on my intuition and experience. Chris gave an example of two hypothetical websites: curemysoreback.com and backpain.org. Those examples were supposed to be obvious, but it occurred to me that a young student might not have the necessary experience to be suspicious of a certain domain name. I'm not sure I could even explain why one is more suspicious than the other, and that helps me realize why it's good to explicitly teach Chris' website evaluation criteria to students.

I have seen this done at ISB, specifically while tutoring some of Margherite's 7th grade students. I don't remember the details, but I (and others) can get a pre-made worksheet for website evaluation at ISB already. It would be interesting to know what websites students naturally find and use and to know how authentic the websites are. How big are the risks of students using bogus websites? How good are the students are recognizing bogus websites before being taught how to evaluate them? And how good are they using explicit criteria. All questions worth looking into.

Dead Writing - post-Clarence Reflection

The example of Clarence's student's blog that received 23000 hits gave me hope that students will be inspired to write (on a blog) because of a real audience rather than just performing for the teacher. I have found that only the motivated students are good at writing to perform for the teacher, while others usually point out the redundancy or pointlessness of the performance: for example, "But you know we're talking about seed germination--why do I need an introductory sentence to tell you that?" I've wondered how to make writing more real and meaninful, but so many of my ideas seem contrived. The best one I had was to give each student a different assignment, so there would be a real information gap that required the students to communicate to fill that gap, but I got scared by coming up with and keeping track of all the individual assignments--a differentiation nightmare. Maybe the world audience on blogs gives the writing a legitimate purpose.

Matt McG shared a similar example of this in his Middle School Technology course. He has students create how-to videos for tasks (for example, how to make a table in Word) and post them on YouTube. (FYI, Notebook Software has Smart Recorder to capture a video of what you see on the computer screen.) His students have been able see how frequently their videos are viewed and what ratings they get by viewers. No "dead" performing for the teacher there! Good example, Mr. McGovernor.