Online Communities and Personal Learning Networks

This is something I have just started to explore this past year after getting my GET certificate.  The more I think of it, this is something I should have been pursing professional much earlier.  It falls right in with the role of the librarian, to help others, answer questions and find information.  The only difference is you don't have someone standing right in front of you.  But this too is just an evolution, the library has evolved from beyond the 4 walls of its building to become a virtual space, so too should the librarian expand beyond the physical into the virtual world to help those that enter the space.  In doing so she/he will learn more than they would have just sitting behind a desk reading a book.

I am always looking for new ways to engage my students and make life easy (and interesting) for my teachers.  In reading through the articles posted in the Cool Tools assignments, I found that there are more ways to incorporate twitter into the classroom than I previously thought.  Two that particularly stood out to me are in the article "20 Interesting Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom," and they were, analyzing how social messages (tweets) and private thoughts differ and analyzing 5 ways tone can be conveyed in a tweet.  The only stumbling block I see is the district restrictions, no one in the district is allowed to access social media (not even teachers).  I had to beg to have Google+ turned on so I could complete my Google Educator Training Certificate.  I would love to be able to incorporate this type of PLN into my Library/Tech classes.  Students need to have experience with online communities that deal with aspects other than just their social life.

Since I was able to get Google+ turned on, this year my focus has been expanding my PLN through Google+.  Prior to this year, PLN were something I used for my personal life only.  I didn't even refer to them as PLN, they were social media, facebook, twitter.  And I certainly would not combine the two, and I still won't.  I am a big believe in my personal life, is my personal life and I will post what I want to post, but it was not until the fall that I realized how helpful this could actually be to my teaching and librarianship.  I was able to reach out to people who had issues similar to mine, get answers that I could use, but more importantly help others, which to me is my job.  This added a new facet to my library.  The resources available to me grew by leaps and bounds in a matter of minutes.

One of the issues I did find was when I joined these communities, I had a whole load of emails to go through.  To keep up with this became quite the job.  I did have to cut back on some of the community notices I was receiving, and I do find that I go to these boards less.  Even just receiving notifications doesn't get me to the boards.  There has to be a happy medium, but I just haven't found it yet.  That will be one of the goals that I continue to work toward.

Photo Fun

I am pretty experienced with the taking and posting of pictures on social networks since in my personal life I take pictures for my daughters cheer gym and post them to a private group with much frequency.  I also (when there is time) do some post production.  But I decided to follow and look more closely into the "Getting Your Feet Wet" option because for me this had the most application in the classroom and I feel that you can never know enough about copyright.  This is one of the topics I cover in my sixth grade Library/Tech class and feel that it is important for students to understand the basics of copyright and follow the rules.  

For students, they find it easy to just google different images, and I would like to break them of this habit by giving them alternatives to use to search and make it easy for them to cite the images and videos they are using.  I found the article "14 copyright essentials teachers and students must know," posted in the comments to be full of information I was unaware of and will now incorporate into my lessons.  

The photo I chose to upload was from Pixabay and I picked this topic becuase it is one of the submjects the students can choose from in the introduction to research part of our class.  

Hensler, Karin. Stonehenge. Digital image. Pixabay. Pixabay, 28 Apr. 2015. Web. 30 Apr. 2016. <https://pixabay.com/en/stonehenge-sky-moon-night-stone-741485/>.

I then modeled the actions the students would have to follow to correctly cite the photos that they choose to use.  The process becomes a little different and students usually don't go to other pages to look for the required information necessary to compete a work cited sheet.   I did find the use of Easybib.com simple and "easy" (pun intended) to cite these resources.  Since it works so well with Google Tools I will definitely continue to incorporate that into the work cited lessons.

As far as the other parts of the lesson, the applications are vast not just outside the classroom in afterschool activities like Photography Club or TV/Media club, but in the classroom as well.  I plan to continue to explore using photography in lessons to make them more engaging as well as more relevant for the students.