Love My Online PLN!

One of my greatest discoveries this past summer was twitter chatting.  I've had a personal twitter account for some time, but decided not too long ago to create a professional account too.  I rarely used it at first, just tweeting about a few things that went on in my classroom, to no one in particular since I had only a handful of followers.  Then this summer, as I was visiting several of my favoite teacher blogs, I started noticing the use of various hashtags and I got curious.  After a little researching, I figured out that the hashtags were being used to carry on conversations revolving around common interests and stumbled on some that pertained to education and math and I was hooked!

I've participated in several chats now and absolutely love this method of learning about my field.  I've walked away from each chat having learned something new about my field, or some new idea for my classroom or some creative way to help me become a better teacher.  We are talking about a Global Professional Learning Network or PLN as there are teachers from across the world involved in these chats.

Take tonight for example.  I participated in the #txed chat, a weekly chat that consists of teachers and administrators from not just Texas, but from many other places too.  We chatted about an article found here. The discussion was awesome!  So many great thoughts shared by some pretty amazing educators.   I even walked away from the chat with an awesome idea to use on my first day of class from Paul Wagner using Chatterpix.  His idea involves the students interviewing each other and then creating a 30 second video using Chatterpix to introduce their "new friend" to the rest of the class.  Love it!  Of course I had to try it out and see how easy it would be to use and then upload the video to my google drive so that I could share with others.  It took me roughly 5 minutes to download the app, take a picture to use in the video and then upload it to my google drive.  You can see my silly first video below.  The kids are going to love this!  Thanks again Paul for such a fun idea!

Looking forward to learning a lot more on my PLN on twitter.  You should join us!