Learning and Acitivites This Week

I have been working on developing my PLN this week. During a Twitter chat I suggested we do a Wikki group for the EDMA 658 class, since we were suppose to try to keep a math focus. I figured that would be a great way to do that. I found Tomas had set on up and joined that page. I invited a few people that I could find. (Anyone is welcome. I am finding it difficult to find people with the different user names.) We have, I believe, five people at this point. On that page I shared the sites that are listed below on this blog. There were very interesting reads about learning styles and perspectives (although not directly related to math). I guess I should stick with the idea and relate it to math. I am excited to be a part of this group, as it is people I have been in the math program classes since last summer. I look forward to working with them in a different way than the Eluminate classes we have been doing. One thing that is making it difficult to develop a PLN is not knowing who writes the blogs I am reading. I have added several blogs to my reader. I like that it posts the new posts without having to go to all the separate blogs. However, a lot of the time I can’t tell who is writing it. It is hard to tell even on some blog pages. I would like to focus more on the blogs of my PLN. As writing this, I am wondering if it is easy to tell who I am from my blog. My blog name is Donna’s Blog, however the site is under dmassin. I guess I best look into my own! We have been communicating in our other class, Data Analysis, Statistics, and Probability: Content and Pedagogy for K-8 Teachers. We have been posting our reflections on an article about Data Driven Decision Making and responding to others’ posts. I learned about a few programs that other schools use to gather and interpret data on their students’ learning. I am very excited to learn about these programs to see if it is something we could use in our school. I learned a new feature of Diigo this week. If you highlight a section of a piece of writing that you bookmark, those highlighted sections show up on your list of sites. You can see an example of this below, where I posted another cool thing I learned in Diigo- how to post to my blog things that I’ve bookmarked. I shared this learning on Twitter. In Twitter this week I have gotten into the habit of checking and reading through Tweets a couple times a day. This helps me by showing me what others are talking about and where to find their blogs and resources they share. I learned about Google Circles by reading Tweets. I was able to watch a video that explained them by going to a site Lee posted in a Tweet. I have a better idea what Circles are, but haven’t had the time to look into setting it up yet. Soon! A classmate suggested that I try Chrome for the ease of bookmarking. I have downloaded Chrome and used it some. I am bouncing back and forth between Chrome and Firefox as of now. Eventually I will choose which I like more. A benefit is being able to have your bookmarks even if you are not on the computer that you made them on. I am also excited to share Xtranormal with my 3rd grade class. They will get such a kick out of making a video. I need to decide what kind of assignment I want them to do. I may just let them play with it at first, and then later use it as a wrap up project to science units.