[Description: For this assignment I learned about Personal Learning Networks and how they are constructed. The three main tools I used to create my PLN are Delicious, Twitter, and Classroom 2.0. From each of these sources I was able to discover how to connect with other people and find educational technology resources. Afterwords, I reflected on the usefulness of my PLN through a journal post.]
1. My personal learning network is divided into two categories: mircobloggers (Twitter) who focus on incorporating technology into the classroom and websites found through the social bookmaking tool Delicious that focus more on resources specifically for history/social studies teachers. I think these two categories work well together especially for history teachers because History is seen as one of the more traditional classes that functions without the use of up-to-date technology, unlike science or computer classes. But because history classes focuses on subject matter from the past and material that many students see as irrelevant or not interesting, technology with help in presenting the material in new and creative ways.
2. My network of 6 people on Twitter consists of 5 teachers (Scott Mcleod, Kelly Smith, Kimberly from EdTech UNconference, Jeffery Heil, and Shelly Terrell) and one collaborative community—EdTech Talk. I chose these people to follow on Twitter after checking their personal blogs and found that they have a lot of good resources and blogposts about incorporating technology into the classroom, tech tools, tutorials on how use certain tools such as Smartboard and how to motivate students using technology.
The educational chat I participated in Twitter was for social studies/history teachers (#sschat) and I chose it because of my aspiration to become a history teacher. The topic of discussion for the chat was who should we, as history/social studies teachers, consider to be important historical figures to include into our curriculums? This topic question was really interesting because who teachers include to focus on in their classrooms is a good reflection of where the teaching of history is today and the personal interests of teachers. Should teachers focus on major figures? Or stories of people who previously had no voice such as women, minorities, the poor and oppressed? Most of the people who participated in the chat were teachers sharing what they were currently doing in their classrooms. The chat lasted an hour and the three main themes that emerged from everyone’s tweets were on (1) revealing interesting and sometimes funny aspects of well-known historical figures in order to make them more interesting for the students to learn about, (2) presenting the more controversial aspects of a historical figure in order make the student determine for themselves whether the person was good or bad and (3) focusing the curriculum on the more unknown segments of a population in history. I had made the comment on the chat that ‘all history is revisionist history and history today is the process of including in the stories of ordinary people and people who did not have control of history and therefore were left out in official record books.' The main revelation in this chat for me was the fact that teachers today have more creativity and autonomy in the historical figures they focus on and they do not necessarily have to focus on teaching only the core historical figures that are taught in traditional history textbooks.3. The two main tags that I was looking for on Delicious were 'resources' and 'history' and I put people into my network that had a lot of sites that had these tags. Four of the websites I tagged as PLN had content that is relevant for history teachers and courses. Since writing and research is a main component of history courses I found a search engine that automatically determines if a text is plagiarized since plagiarism is a concern in these courses. I also tagged an essay called 'How to create non-readers' since reading is also a large part that makes up history courses. The third history specific site I tagged PLN is a site called Eyewitness to History and if focuses on telling important historical events through the eyes of ordinary people which is good for presenting a different side to the more traditional ways of presenting an event to a class. The last site I tagged for history is a site called Making Sense of Evidence that helps students and teachers how to determine the authenticity of sources such as books, pictures, movies, etc. which is good tool for doing research. The other site I tagged dealt with either finding tech tools for use in the classroom and tutorials on how to use them (such as Atomic Learning).
4.The article I read from Classroom 2.0 was titled "Wikipedia is NOT Wicked!" by Gwyneth Jones. The main argument of the article is to convey the idea teachers have the wrong impression when they look down upon using Wikipedia as a resource/research. Attached to the blogpost is an article which talks about a study done by a Nature journal where they compared the accuracy of Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Britannica. It found that Wikipedia was only slightly less accurate as Britannica (per article) and that certain high profile cases of deliberate misinformation put on the site were the exception to the rule. The blogpost argues that teaches can't ignore Wikipedia because of how pervasive it is as a source of information. However, it is argued that Wikipedia best left for getting background information, looking up key words, and terms rather for heavy or serious research. Wikipedia should provide context and focus to a student's research in order to cut down on reading unnecessary or redundant information. I agreed with the article's argument saying that is should only be used as a starting point for gathering information. What was really surprising to find out was how accurate Wikipedia was compared to other sources that were seen as more credible, although every time I would use it for research I rarely encountered information that was clearly out-of-place. Teachers I think are hesitant to accept Wikipedia as a legitimate source even if there are references provided for the information because of how easy it is to access the information, unlike sifting through scholarly journals or books and the fact that it doesn't go into heavy detail--although the article makes the point that it shouldn't be intended for that purpose, and just like Britannica is only used for general information.
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