Journal 7: My Personal Learning Network NETS-T III,IV & V

I created my personal leaning network which is composed of Twitter, Delicious, and the digital discussion forum Classroom 2.0. On twitter, I contributed in an educational chat and followed members with similar interest in education. On, Delicious I book marked websites and also added educators to my network. Finally in the digital discussion forum I became a member and read an article about bullying in schools. My PLN allows me to search, share, and exchange ideas with other educators.

My personal learning network is composed of Twitter, Delicious, and the Digital Discussion Forum Classroom 2.0. This network will help me as a future educator by keeping me informed about current events in education. It will also help me because I can search, share, and exchange ideas with other educators that I can use in my classroom.

Through the use of twitter I can search and exchange ideas with other educators across the globe. My network is composed of current and future educators. The reason I choose them was because we have the same interest and in the future we can exchange ideas that are useful in the classroom. Through twitter I participated in the educational chat called #edchat. I found it very interesting and was amazed on how many people share their ideas and opinion. We discussed about the use of social networks such as face book in school and for learning. I enjoyed reading different responses because it made me think from other perspectives. I learned that many more educators agree on the use of social networks than not. It definitely went fast; new tweets were coming in all the time during that designated hour.

Through Delicious I am able to book mark important sites and share with others what I have found.  I also created network of individuals who had an interest in education. Through their book marks I could also discover a wealth of information that I can use as a future educator. I tagged a few educational bogglers, digital discussion forums and educational wikis because they had good information that would also provide me with new ideas and resources and expand my personal learning network.

I joined the Classroom 2.0 digital discussion forum. There I was looking around through the latest activity and seeing what other members had posted. I came across Lauren Brodlo who had added a discussion to the group “Bullies Beware” that she also created. The topic was Bullying and the affect on gay students. She mentioned that one of the reasons she started that page was because of the recent story in the news about Tyler Clementi, the student at Rutgers who had committed suicide after his roommate had posted a video of him with another male student. As I kept on reading I was finding it very interesting. She posted a link to an interesting article titled “can we stop the Gay Bullying Epidemic?  http://www.education.com/magazine/article/gay-bullying-epidemic/

This article provided tips to help parents teach anti bullying to their kids. I thought this article was interesting because as a future educator bullying is an issue that is prevalent at any age level and the sooner we take action to prevent it the better. I think its very unfortunate how sometimes lives are lost because of other people’s ignorance. Bullying clearly can be detrimental to student’s self esteem and life, so it is very important to finds ways to prevent it in school, communities, and societies around the world. Everyone deserves respect regardless of their beliefs, background, gender, etc. Taking small steps today can make a difference tomorrow.