PLN Blog for a Spanish Teacher

While exploring the educator side of twitter, I found a number of interesting things in less than 30 minutes. The first tweet I found was from McGraw Hill Education, and it was a quote about the importance of educational technology ( https://twitter.com/MHEducation/status/921752957389074438). The quote in the tweet was from Steven Laster, the Chief Digital Officer of McGraw Hill. It essentially talked about the potential educational technology has to change lives. This could be something I keep as a personal mantra, or share with my coworkers or even students. The next tweet I found was a retweet by Mark Anderson ( https://twitter.com/87History/status/921972585218355200) . It included a graphic that outlined the four stages of teacher confidence in using educational technology. This is something that taught me a lot about the different stages that different teachers may be. The four stages are survival, mastery, impact, and innovation. This will help me understand how my fellow...

               When going through the RSS Feeds, I had the opportunity to read two articles that helped me to learn a lot about different issues in education. The first article was entitled "Is creative work really worth the time in the classroom?" and essentially performed a cost-benefit analysis on creative work. The article featured a video that focused on creative capacities. It brought up dual coding theory which is a process that occurs during creative work and plays a major role in things like comprehension, memory and instruction. Another thing that struck me about creative work was the fact that it is easily sharable and promotes a dynamic exchange of ideas. When students know that they are going to have an audience, they are more motivated to do well.                The second article I read was entitled "Teaching the College Essay", and is super relevant to my future career as I will be working ...

A Professional Learning Network, or PLN, is defined as "a connected group of learners who  collaborate and share to obtain inspiration, ideas, and trade best practices. " The purpose of this connected group of learners is to help increase efficiency of information shared between teachers so that teachers have easier access to necessary resources. Through this, teachers can stay up-to-date on different educational practices. This also allows teachers to network globally, and expand their community of learning to a significantly larger chunk of participants. Through my PLN, I hope to gain unique perspectives from other foreign language teachers. More specifically, I am a nonnative Spanish speaker going into a teaching job where I will have students who are native Spanish speakers, and I want to have a lot of resources for navegating those kinds of situations. One way that I plan to grow my PLN is through using Twitter. I want to make an account separate from my personal Tw...