Tag Archives: pln

#ozseries Community Connect: Connecting and Collaborating with the Innovate Here Online Community

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Tomorrow night on the Australia e-Series I will be presenting the last of a series of Community Connect webinars focussing on Connected Education, a USA initiative held during August. Here are the details…you are welcome to join us.

When: Thursday September 6th, 8 to 9, Melbourne AEST (GMT +10)

About This Session: Tomorrow night Community Connect welcomes Karen Dowling and Nyunkia Tauss from the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development’s Innovate Here team.

We identify, stimulate and support local-level innovation in Victoria, across early childhood, schools, and higher education. As part of our work with Innovate Here we help practitioners and organisations connect and collaborate with other like-minded educators, build their professional learning networks (PLN) – both online and face to face, be inspired by examples of Victorian innovation in education and share experiences of trying something new. This includes exploring how to establish an appropriate professional social media presence, and how to get the most from your PLN, whether you’d like to get ideas, share ideas, find collaborators or share your idea with a wider network (eg #VicPLN).

You are welcome to download this paper for more information about Innovate Here.

Come along to Community Connect and join us in a conversation with Karen and Nyunkea about connecting and collaborating online.

Where: Here is the Blackboard Collaborate link for tomorrow night’s webinar.



Webinar Recording: Thank’s Karen and Nyunkia for an interesting and informative session. Please select this link if you would like to listen to the recording. 

Support Network

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My support network is made up of many parts, both personal and professional, online and offline.

This week’s task for Reflect and Connect was to use a web tool to illustrate our support network.

I had a bit of fun and chose sketchfu to make a small animation that can be viewed by clicking on this image.

Here’s a few thoughts about support networks:

  • they’re human, social and, at times, can be supported and enabled by technology
  • made up of people connected through family, work and hobbies
  • precious and valued
  • informal
  • two way
  • need to be trusted
  • can be virtual
  • need nurturing
  • provide emotional and practical help
  • life long and fluid…relationships come and go

I’d be interested to share more thoughts about your support networks.

Who do you turn to for advice, how do you keep your network alive?

Activity 8…Promote That Blog

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Last year I completed a 12 week professional development program for educators. The first activity was to set up this blog as a place to reflect on the course and communicate with other participants. This image shows the tools I used to develop my online Personal Learning Network (PLN).

VicPLN

For my post on “Promote That Blog” I selected words from this Wordle Build Blog Relationships to chat about.

Building a Personal Learning Network started with the 2010 Personal Learning Network for Victorian Schools program. Until then my PLN consisted mainly of colleagues at school, particularly those in the maths and science departments.

Now I think of my PLN as the whole collection of educators that I chat to, learn from and share information with, online and face to face.

The building of relationships started with a blog and grew as comments were exchanged between participants. Commenting built connections which started the process of peer to peer teaching, learning and the sharing of information.

The next stage of building a PLN took us out of the comfort zone of blogging and into the Twitter network of micro bloggers, using the hash tag #VicPLN.

After several attempts over a few months I was tweeting away and sharing links with my PLN. Twitter has become a place of professional development, with educators from around the world, at any time of day or night.

Connecting in real time, via Elluminate, in a webinar with passionate educators, has been a highlight of developing a PLN.

To appreciate my enthusiasm, have a look at Anne Mirtschin’s article “Building a Digital Classroom with Global Educators”, and read about yesterday’s Tech Talk Tuesdays webinar.

Lately Facebook has come to my attention, as a place for networking and continuing the conversation with my PLN.

I’ve created a professional account to chat with educators from around the world and a Group for mentoring participants doing the Teacher Challenge.

It’s early days yet, I need to continue scrutinising the settings and reading everyone’s tips.

I’ve been chatting about how my PLN developed without focusing on how to “Promote That Blog”. Having an online presence where you interact, comment on other’s blogs, tweet new posts, retweet great finds, share links, images, tools and quality information….that’s all good promotion.

It doesn’t have to be the explicit, in your face, shout it out from the rooftops kind of self promotion…for me it’s about staying safe online, feeling comfortable, being professional, making contributions, helping others and sharing information.

Would anyone be interested joining a Facebook Group to continue the conversation about using Facebook in education?

Let me know and I’ll start one up…

Thank you to the creators of Shabby Blogs for allowing me to use their images in this post.

 

It’s Not Over Yet

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I’ve had a brilliant time completing the tasks throughout this program. I chose Slideshare to present some highlights from the last 12 weeks but sadly had no success with embedding the video’s. My plan is to trial this presentation with a variety of other tools over the next week to see if I can get some animation up and running. This isn’t the end of my blogging adventure, but now I need to step back and have a think…

I’ve discovered so many wonderful educators out there, in the blogosphere, who are creating and sharing an enormous amount of information about education. So, these thoughts have been racing around my head:

-What will be the specific focus of my blog?
-How do I create unique content that is of value to others?
-How will I attract and maintain interest in the blog?
-Do I need to reveal more about my identity in order to build genuine online relationships?
-How do I maintain my interest when I know that people are visiting but not commenting?
-How often do I need to post?…etc, etc

For the rest of this year I’m not able to use all of the wonderful Web 2.0 tools in the classroom. However, Cloud9 Tutoring has evolved as a result of the VicPLN program. I’ve only just put myself online, to voluntarily tutor students in Maths and Science. I wonder if anyone is interested to have a go?
Now that I have a PLN…I would love some feedback about my blogging questions and how to distract the hoards of students on Facebook who need to chat about Maths and Science.

Thank you so much to everyone involved in the planning and delivery of the VicPLN Program….and a special thanks to our mentor extraordinaire, Judith Way.

http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=vicpln2010forslideshare-100729210723-phpapp02&stripped_title=vicpln

We’re in for a real treat this weekend…The Reform Symposium…see you there!

Reform Symposium

Problem Solved

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I started out this year with the aim of teaching myself the skills to tutor students online. Well, it wasn’t long before I was struggling with information overload, frustration, self doubt then resignation. It was at this point that I came across this PLN program, I was thrown a lifeline. My hand is being held as I play around in a maze of carefully filtered possibilities for educators. I’m now on the right track and moving closer to setting things up and giving it a go.

Well, today I had a closer look at Edmodo and realised that it could work as a “home base” for my tutoring. It has everything I need: live chat, sharing of files and assignments, a password protected private “room” for each student (and maybe a parent and/or teacher), the provision of links to take students out of Edmodo into my Elluminate room to use the interactive whiteboard and more.

Is anyone in this PLN an online tutor and do you have any tips or advice? Love to speak to someone.