PL+Goal+5

=(Engage in professional growth and leadership) =

==Personal Learning Goal: Participate and collaborate in our classroom learning community and online communities to explore the relationship between our students’ learning and digital technologies. ==

Over the course of this summer, I really believe that I have met this goal. The idea of collaborating and publishing to enhance practice was really intimidating to me, I think because I began my work towards this goal independent of our classroom community foraging through Digital IS. While this site is filled with resources, I didn’t feel like I had a good enough point of entry to begin blogging there, like I lacked expertise. Our classroom community was a huge help to me in developing this confidence, as was the course work itself for both this class as well as Dr. George’s, in that I honestly do feel far more “digitally literate” as a result. Specifically, I feel like I’ve opened a really important door for myself in beginning to use twitter in a professional capacity.

Classroom Learning Community:

In adition to some of the really excellent discussions which we have had on google classrooms, (as well as the ridiculous wealth of information posted to the wiki preceding the conversation!) I’ve greatly appreciated learning from my classmates who have been posting to our [|class blog]. I’m excited to use some of the time I will have in August to actually go in depth with some of the resources that have been brought to my attention with the intention of incorporating them into my curriculum. I really have a soft spot for wikispaces, too. I think that often, online platforms are considered interactive simply for the fact that they allow comments, but I feel like the way that our class used wikispaces was properly collaborative, even without this feature. I hope to continue and expand my contributions to and use of wiki. Moving into the brief time we spent together as a class in physical space, I loved the digital literacies conference, and even tried out my first live twitter conversation during it.





Online Communities:

I spent quite a bit of time this summer perusing DigitalIS, and was shocked at the amount of resources and insights that are housed there. It was great to hear affirmations and ideas about the [|common core being used to promote civic engagement]/YPAR, about educators embracing particpatory culture, and about [|connected learning] - probably the most exciting discovery of my personal learning this summer. I'm convinced of the importance of writing about practice, but have yet to throw myself into this endeavor head first. I have, however, (begun to) plunge into the dramatically shorter, and much more immediately interactive form of writing...on Twitter! This summer I had to set up a twitter account, [|@schlngu](...yes, as in "schooling you") for part of the requirements for Dr. George’s class on YA lit. I did tweet about YA lit a couple of times, but more importantly, this platform has become a centerpiece in my PLN, and I anticipate that I will greatly expand my use of it.*I understand my role as an educator to be quite political, and this has helped me link up with a lot of like-minded educators, activists and rights groups.  *I think largely due to this course's influence, I took the plunge and got a smartphone this weekend (see selfie om cover page) - more tweets to come.

Grade: A