The Web of Education

Greetings readers, if you are still reading, I greatly appreciate your support. Being an educator, you learn that you are definitely not alone when it comes to teaching. As you maneuver and learn, the proverb, "it takes a village to teach a child," rings truer and truer. Professional Learning Networks (PLN) offer a connection to other educators and learning specialists as a form of support and collaboration. I have two recommendations for all educators: find a PLN and join it. We as educators, can always learn something new and innovative. If you as an educator think you have reached the peak of your curriculum, I can without a doubt tell you, you are completely wrong. Like any professional from doctor to athlete, you need to continuously refine your craft. If we stay complacent, our methods and instructional practices become outdated. Compare this to technology, do we still use the same technologies as 5 years ago? Of course not. In the age of technology that we are in, you cannot afford not to be up to date with what is current. Why should our teaching strategies be any different? I am a firm believer that, you get what you put into anything. Dedication and effort really do go a long way. My learners know that I dedicate large amounts of time to preparing and adapting my lessons to them. Hearing them mention that "I work too much" or "this must have taken a long time" reassure me that I am putting in my honest effort. In response, they are motivated to "match my energy" as they so refer to it. But not only the indirect motivation, but the actual strategies and resources have to be well throughout. Going back to my village proverb, as an educator, many will tell you, using your resources (PLN), as a supportive system to share ideas and instructional resources. If you are a less experienced teacher, these PLNs are gold mines for them as they may be starving for anything they can get. We can all recount our times as an eager educator, wanting to change the world one student at a time. The challenge is, how do we do this? Well your more experienced colleagues are where they should look.

Shifting over to my personal PLN, I created my own cycle of self-educational improvement. I believe that the next step for me to continuously improve falls under the professional learning and improved instructional strategy implementation. I believe one area that I need to improve is expanding my professional networking and working with specialists who have classroom proven strategies. This is where LinkedIn will come into play. As a social networking site for professionals. This will allow me to connect with other education professionals in discussion boards and expand my knowledge on up to date methods and research. The next two resources which I plan on integrating in my PLN is AVID and Edutopia. Both of these resources offer instructional strategies which are backed by research to benefit students. By raising the academic rigor in the classroom, I will be able to enhance my instructional practices and raise the bar for my students to benefit them in my classroom.