[MUSIC] Hi, I'm Dr. Susie Gronseth. I'm one of the faculty in the learning design and technology program area at the University of Houston. This course has introduced many powerful Web 2.0 tools for teaching and learning. And hopefully you have added some of these tools to your own teaching tool kit though your participation in this course. Though I have been using Web 2.0 tools in my classroom for many years. I continue to learn and incorporate new tools into my instructional activities on a regular basis. So how do I learn new web 2.0 tools? In this video I will show you one way that helps me keep my tool kit current and ever expanding with the use of new web 2.0 tools. It is through my Personal Learning Network, PLN, that consists of the colleagues that I follow through social media that continuously brings new tools to my attention. A Personal Learning Network or PLN for short, is composed of colleagues, local and distant, family, community, professional organization, and online information aggregated from internet searches, podcasts, blogs, and social media. This network of individuals, groups, and information sources, can be tailored to your professional learning needs and interests. The PLN allows you to build professional connections with colleagues in your school and around the globe, as you share new ideas, new tools, and new ways of using tools you may already be familiar with. Consider the people you have met through this course. You have likely already expanded your personal learning network as you engaged with fellow educators in the discussion forums and Google hangouts. And consider the resources shared in this course. Websites, videos, articles, and tool help and support sections are available for you to dig deeper into the concepts that are most interesting and useful to you for your professional teaching practice. Well I certainly have learned a few tools from fellow local colleagues in my school, I find that I presently use more distant connections in my PLN to continue building on my web 2.0 tool kit. Social media is a great way to connect with local to global thought leaders and have their ideas and essence delivered to me in a study stream of information that I can delve into as my time allows. This is how I go about developing my PLN in this way. There are four steps. The first step is to discover thought leaders who post great ideas. Through technologies like Pinterest, blogs, Google Plus, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. In this video, I'll introduce you to a few thought leaders to get you started. You follow these thought leaders and bookmark their sites in your information aggregators, so you can see the content that they share. You can view this content through your individual Pinterests, Google Plus, Twitter, etc, accounts, or by visiting their websites regularly. Or you can use a tool like feedly. Feedly.com to view all of your information sources in one place. You will likely find that once you start following a few good ones, other great follows will be suggested or mentioned in their posts. You can then continue adding follows to your network to continue expanding your net for ideas that you can use in your classroom. Then make reading, skimming, through your post a regular part of your work routine. Because the individuals I'm going to recommend to you posts quite often. I find that it is easier to look through posts in short verse than to spend a long amount of time wading through a large number of posts. You're going to encounter a great deal of information. And it is easy to get overloaded. I don't try to read every post, and I take breaks from reading through the posts when life gets extra busy. But I do scan the posts when I can, and usually find a few new ideas and tools that make it worth the time spent. Finally it's important to do something with the information. Try out some new tools. I usually create an account and look through the help and support files first. Then I explore the tool and use the help area, internet searches and YouTube videos to learn about how to use the tool features. If I see a ready connection to my courses, I begin writing the class activity in which I will use the tool. If no connection is presently apparent, I bookmark the tool and file it away for use later on. Here are ten follows that you can use to begin building out your PLN. They're educational technology leaders in organizations who regularly share web 2.0 tools and implementation ideas. They also maintain websites or blogs that contain lists of tools for you to research. The @ is their Twitter handle. You can also find them through other social media means, such as Google + and Pinterest. But their Twitter handle and website URLs will be enough to get you started. Let me introduce you to them. Richard Byrne @rmbyrne is a writer, teacher, speaker from Maine. He maintains the website Freetech4teachers.com where you can find his thoughts on new tools and ways to use them in the classroom. Check out the free guides. Jessica Johnston @edtechchick is an instructional technology specialist in Texas. She has a great web 2.0 tools page on her blog. Edtechchic.blogspot.com I encourage you to check it out. Erin Klein @KleinErin is an elementary teacher in Michigan. On her website, www.kleinspiration.com, she frequently posts about web 2.0 tools, and you can find guides to different types of web 2.0 tools in the very lower right of her website. Donna Baumbach at Antitech, is a retired educational technology professor in North Carolina. She created the website, WebTools4U2Use.wikispaces.com that has a lot of tools and ideas organized by tool type. Kathy Schrock, @kathyschrock, is a former school district director of technology and school librarian. She is now an educational technologist and speaker in Massachusetts. Her homepage, www.kathyschrock.net, is a launching point for many of her resources that she curates, including Kathy Shrock's Guide to Everything in which you can learn about tools and apps for education. Vicky Davis @CoolCatTeacher is a teacher and IT director in Georgia. She shares tips for using a variety of Web 2.0 tools In the tools section of her website. Lenva Shearing, @Lenva is a Principal in New Zealand. She developed a similar website to Donna Bombock's web tools for you to use, in which she links to many, many tools and ideas by tool type. The website, is cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com. Steven Anderson, @Web20Classroom, is a former teacher and director of instructional technology in North Carolina. Keep logs about the web 2.0 connected classroom @blog.web20classroom.org. Edudemic @edudemic is an information source out of Washington state. On their website, www.edudemic.com, you can find articles about new web 2.0 tools and ways to use them in the classroom. Their teacher's guides are also very good. Edutopia is run by the George Lucas Educational Foundation. Check out the technology integration topic section on their website, www.edutopia.org for research base strategies, to use web 2.0 tools, and teaching and learning. So there you have it. Ten great folks from around the world to get you started on your way to building a great PLN that you can use to continue learning about web 2.0 tools. By following these thought leaders, reading their posts, and trying out some of the ideas that they share, you can ensure that your toolkit will continue to grow as you add to it with your knowledge of these powerful tools for teaching and learning.
