PLN

As teachers we need to take more responsibility for our own Professional Development over and above that which is school directed and provided. This is where we need to develop our own Personal Learning Network.

A PLN consists of the people, places, and things that help you learn. These can be web based, print based or the network of people we interact with in our teaching and learning environment. This creates an active personal learning network.

A good overview on what makes a good PLN can be seen here.

My PLN

There are other components I could add to this such as Professional Organisations, Mentors and Newsletters/Publications that I could subscribe to. This is a start however.

E-Portfolios

After a year of working and sometimes struggling with MyPortfolio I was less then happy with how it was working for the rest of the staff and me. Concerns I had included the lack of entries and the lack of response to people's posts. While I could see the value of MyPortfolio it presented difficulties for our staff in that it was not an easy format to get to grips with and this led to some frustration and in turn put people off. A survey I conducted at the end of last year with the staff confirmed this. To counter this I've explored various options and feel using the new version of Blogger with it's ability to create pages may be a better and simpler option. Teachers have also had experience already with Blogger as the platform for their class blogs.

Once set up we can then assign buddys to each teacher and have them providing quality feedback on the posts which will mostly cover our work in Literacy.

Another facit of e-portfolios is the ability of teachers to reflect on their learning and work in the classroom-often we feel we have nothing to say. This is something we could also work on and could be a good workshop for our upcoming mini ICT conference.