Presenting PLNs to Coworkers
I gave a presentation to my coworkers today on Professional Learning Networks (If you read this, you already follow Jeff Utecht whose presentation I attended at EARCOS).
I have long enjoyed being one of the only teachers on staff who knows about RSS feeds and PLNs (like when you hoard your favorite music and hope no one else discovers it), but felt it was time to share with others.
Method:
- POW – Used “how not to use Power Point” and some of the new Google search options to show how my PLN has influenced my teaching.
- Distinguished PLNs from Online Learning Communities (which my group has so far associated with a network designed for students).
- RSS Feeds. Introduced the idea of a feed and showed them my Reader and Bloglines feeders. I mentioned Feedburner, but I don’t use it.
- Microblogging – Introduced Twitter and Wefollow as sites that we can use to rapidly browse the educator’s online community.
- Social Bookmarking – Introduced Delicious as a place where we can rapidly store information and share it with other teachers.
- Provided the staff with some links to educational blogs and set them loose on the Internet. I also sent an email of the links we covered to them.
In review:
- I wanted this to be a completely optional session that teachers could opt into or not. So I tried to make it happen in just a half hour, which was too rushed. Having said that, delivery of content did not take very long; most of the time was spent surfing.
- I found the staff bought into the idea of using RSS feeds.
- I’m not sure that they saw the value of edublogs. If I were to do this again, I’d try to find some of Dy/Dan’s best posts.
- Twitter was adopted by some, but not all. I was not surprised by this since it took me quite a while to get into micro blogging.
- I tried to stress that a PLN is only as good as the time you spend working on it. So we’ll see how it goes.
If you use PLNs, have you considered sharing?
May 20th, 2009 at 6:37 am
I know that ‘hoarding’ feeling, but the sharing ethos of PLN is rubbing off, so I’m starting to open up more too, and may end up doing something similar to you.
I shared Prezi with a colleague who is using it in a job interview today. For a millisecond I felt that pang of resentment (”I bet they’ll be really impressed, and won’t even know it was IIIII who showed her how to do it.”) then I just felt really pleased that the she’d valued the information so much to want to use it in such a critical situation.
Changes your outlook, this PLN stuff, doesn’t it?
June 14th, 2009 at 3:30 am
[...] my school, we spend quite a bit of time presenting ideas to each other. It’s something all of us should do more than once. What we currently [...]