Positively Loving Professional Learning!

If you are a teacher, you have heard about professional development. I don't know about you, but my mind instantly thinks of sitting in the library of some school in my district for long meetings that may or may not be something that inspires me as an educator.

Guess what? You don't have to just wait for your district to HOPEFULLY give you a session you are excited about. 

Enter Professional Learning Networks.

A Professional Learning Network (PLN) is a way for you to connect to other educators from all over the world. Here is a fun image that lists the benefits of PLNs that my graduate school teacher included in our class this week.

There are many types of PLNs including message boards, facebook, linkedin, but my all-time favorite is Twitter.

Before this week, I would call myself a Twitter dabbler. But now I am IN LOVE! I took this opportunity to update my educator account, follow some inspiring teachers, and I really started learning more about some cool resources like #edchat.

Edchats are scheduled chats on various Twitter groups. They have a moderator whose job it is to ask specific questions on a topic. I really liked the chat I found on #learnlap (Based on the new book Learn Like a Pirate). It was a really great topic about student motivation.

Now I know what my summer reading will be! Interested in learning more? Check out their weekly discussions on Monday nights at 8 p.m. CST.

I also think I will focus on using Twitter next school year to really include my parents. I can use my account as an extension of our classroom uploading photos and videos so they can see what we are up to all day!

Another reason I like Twitter is that I can easily follow other teachers and find current ideas for my classroom. I follow teachers in my district as well as teachers from across the country, like the famous Ron Clark. Interested in following me? Find me! @Mrs_Bailey_HI . (The HI is my school's logo in case you were wondering.)

Finally, I will leave you with an amazing tool to help you organize all of the fun things you will surely find! 

Diigo is a tool that helps you bookmark websites via the web browser, so you can access your bookmarks anywhere you use the internet. Therefore, it does not matter which computer I am on to access my bookmarks. Additionally, I can join groups and share bookmarks easily!

Another feature of diigo is the highlighter and sticky notes tool. This is fantastic for conducting research because it allows the user to take notes on the page and saves that page. No more opening a separate word document or printing off pages!

Finally, I learned from the diigo blog that you can now import all of your highlighted material from your kindle so that you can sort and organize it on diigo. Where was this tool during my undergraduate courses?

Here is a great video explaining diigo basics. Maybe you will love it as much as I do!