I still do not think that I am gaining the full benefit from my Personal Learning Network. I feel as if I were able to devote more of my time searching an learning from the different blogs that I am following I would be gaining a lot more from this. I seem to be benefiting most from my rss feeds along with the different sites I have tagged on my delicious site rather than Twitter. I am still having a harder time adapting to how this fits into my PLN. I am interested in trying out one of the "webinar's?" I think that this would be interesting and a new experience for me to check out and see what I would be able to gain from something like this. As a whole I think that there is a lot more to gain from a PLN than I have recently been able to do. I think that it is a great way to communicate with others who are interested in the same things and be able to pick up and throw around various ideas.
It takes time to learn, and however much effort you put in you can't significantly speed up that process. You'd know that from gymnastics, right? You practice certain moves hundreds or thousands of times and they become instinctive. Think about teaching as forming a kind of 'muscle memory'... Donald Schon calls it 'knowing in action', the stage at which the expert teacher knows the 'right' thing to do without concious thought. That is not to say that a PLN is pointless - indeed, collaboration and reflection will help you become better and help you maintain motivation in the long term. But I think every teacher should read about teacher development pathways, from Frances Fuller, to Michel Huberman, to realise that it's normal to goes through stages of difficulty and that expertise comes and goes even for the experienced teacher.
ReplyDeleteDarren
www.livesofteacher.com
I definitely agree with you. I'm glad to hear that the RSS is working for you though because I am having a harder time utilizing that. I think we need to remember that not every single thing we learn about in this class is going to make the most sense for each of us. I really like that Darren, above, compared using tech to muscle memory. With a dance background that metaphor completely makes sense to me and I really agree, it is just something we have to keep doing.
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