Today’s Topics: More on Building a PLN

Judy Gressel continued her summary of "Build Your PLN Using Social Media Tools" on building a personal learning network. The link to the Prezi is here. She encouraged participants to just begin to "listen" to those who are blogging, etc. and to then take the step of creating your own voice and environment. She showed a video of Will Richardson saying that we have to do this for ourselves in order to understand how this works so that we can help our students be prepared for the future. Richardson will be online next Wednesday, October 27^th; more info here.

JudyG showed the pervasiveness of Social Media with this chart.

For setting up a blog, she suggested using Blogger. She also suggested looking into Feedblitz for subscribing; and RSS Feeds to follow information. Questions? Bring them to our future sessions or see JudyG. Wikis were mentioned, including a simulation and those by Warlick and Rheingold – see last meeting’s notes (below) with the Prezi for more links. Social Bookmarking – another area to investigate. Request was made to consider the topic of Social Bookmarking and separately RSS Feeds and possibly setting up a Blog for future sessions.

And then Twitter…. JudyG uses paper.li to gather the info that she follows; link is here. Judy and others made the point about how much they have learned from following Twitter – more than attending conferences. You can follow individuals or follow discussions like #edchat or #edtech. She recommends using a TweetDeck or other organizing device. Judy uses Twitter for her advisory parents also.

We finished with a video whose presenter said how we connect… is not about the tools…it’s about the personal connections and learning from each other. On that note, we will meet again in 2 weeks (Nov. 2) and talk about creating forms with Adobe Acrobat.

In attendance: Raquelle Brennan, Ian Duell, Erika Eich, Jim Foster, Judy Gressel, Andy Horne, Keta McCarthy, Linda Straube, and Matt Stuczynski.