A Personal Adventure creating My Personal Learning Network

Today I am going to take you on route with me as I begin creating my personal learning network.

First, I google "creative writing" because I am going to be an English teacher and have a special interest in creative writing. I want to find tools and resources to help me be a better teacher for my students. The Internet as well as a personal learning network can help me do this.

Google brings up the results and after scrolling through some of the results, I see Sydney Writers' Centre blog that lists all sorts books written by different teacher's or just books in general that are good reads for teacher's to use in their classrooms. There was two books that stood out to me- "The Puzzle Ring" which is a book that has just been released and was written by a teacher named Kate Forsyth ; and "Once" by Morris Gleitzman which is about a child during the Holocaust. This book reminds me of a teaching lesson I read about in "A Curriculum of Peace: Selected Essays from English Journal". It is about a little Polish boy during the Holocaust. I decide to follow this blog and then I go visit Morris Gleitzman's page and see that he has some recorded video chats about his book available on the Puffin Books website, so I watch those and then visit the "Wondrous Reads" blog where there is a review about the book.

I follow the blog and read every one's comments on the books. I click the button to go to the author of the blogs' "Twitter" page and decide to go ahead and join Twitter. My name is "bloggerbaby11". This makes me laugh.

I see where a guy posted that educators have a new conversation about the art in education and I click on the link. This leads me to "edutopia" so I become a member of this edutopia community so I can leave my comments and read others. After searching for a little while, I find a blog on there that is about the benefits of taking students outside to inspire writing, posted by Stephen Hurley. I read the comments posted by the different teachers and saw where a teacher used the book, " Last Child in the Woods" which talks about the effects outdoors has on education. I go visit the author Richard Louv's website and find all sorts of articles and interviews about education. After reading through some of these articles, I decide that I liked Kate Muir's article "The Dark Ages". Muir just so happens to have a twitter and facebook account. I ask her to be my friend on facebook and I follow her on twitter. The next time this girl writes an interesting article, I will know and can check it out.

While I'm on twitter again, I decide to check out Beth Still's (she was listed on Ms. Averitt's handout) page and click on a link she has provided "Avenue4Learning" and get some ideas for classroom lessons using "Photobucket" where I am already a member. The lesson talks about students using photography to write poems and how the students get really involved when writing assignments use photos to make things more interesting. It was very creative I must say! I subscribe to the site by enrolling my email address and happen to notice her Blog Roll that includes "Drape's Takes". I go visit Drape and am especially interested in his take on why every teacher should blog. I watch his podcast video and his videos available on YouTube. I read his poem, "If I were you" and thought it was really cute! I told him so after I subscribed to his blog.

Being a part of all these people's blogs, twitter accounts, facebook pages, and more will allow me to have access to teaching resources as soon as they are made available. These people will be there in my technology world to answer questions I may have, give me good ideas, let me share my opinions and teaching ideas with them, and more. I enjoyed the journey.