Assignment #5

Prior to this week I had never thought of having a network that consisted of mainly online connections. At this point however, I truly believe that the connections we are building, especially through is an ever growing and evolving network that I will use from here on out. Whether I need to reach out to a cohort member for advice on a certain situation, or to reach out and research a district or individual where I will be having a potential job interview, the site has endless possibilities. LinkedIn will also help me stay connected with people who I have already established relationships with, and through those same people, I can grow my own network which will only help me in the future. After learning everything up to this point, I now feel confident that I am going to take back a few select items (blogging for sure) to share with my staff and to also use it as one of my projects so I will be essentially leading a professional development activity. Getting teachers to engage in creating their own blog where assignments can be updated daily, students can comment and ask questions on, will eliminate student emails to teachers, eliminate the need for a classroom website which can be very clunky at times for people to navigate. With a quick sentence or two, you can have almost instant access to your students and the students can have real time help for those teachers who are willing to reply to a quick blog post after dinner for a student who is struggling with something that was assigned on their homework. I will be pushing blogs to staff members by showing them how simple they are to set up and maintain. Teachers can even set up videos or links to certain websites or resources for the kids to assist them in homework or class concepts as well. This entire post relates to standard 3 simply because I am trying to empower teachers to think outside the box and use "newer" technology to empower their students to further their learning with those new resources. Another way that this connects to standard 3 is that I can use some of my resources within my PLN as potential "professionals" who could also do some professional development with my staff on technologies that we as a building are trying to implement. The PLN has literally endless uses for professionals in many facets of their day to day work.