Chance favours the connected mind!

It's been a while since I posted ... so here goes a short one to get back into the swing of things.

Steven Johnson, author of "Where Good Ideas Come From", is someone new to me, and this short 4 minute clip to me gives great sway to why cultivating a PLN is so important in learning and teaching these days. We all want to have the great ideas, the creative ideas ... but if only we knew how ...

Listen to Steven as this animation gives you some good ideas about how to get those "good ideas". Think of the coffee house and the camp fire and the drinking hole ... and using your PLN and storing stuff away when you first hear/see it ... gives you some great ideas for developing your thoughts using tools that are there to help. Think Twitter, think blog, think EverNote, think RSS, think FlipBoard ...

This is a great starter for "getting started"!

"Chance favours the connected mind!" - awesome!

The Individual Responsibility for Professional Development

Many teachers have some form of "personal learning network" or PLN. If you don't, then it isn't too late to start and, in fact, is pretty much essential to be a functioning participant in the environment of education we find ourselves these days. This is all because there is just so much happening that unless you are linked in somehow to "the network" the you are being left behind.

So, what does my PLN look like?

Well, I don't go far without my trusty RSS feeds from a few places that I couldn't do without.  I was gutted when Google killed off Google Reader earlier this year - but I've gotten over it slowly and I am now happy using InoReader as my aggregator and I prefer to read on my iPad using Feeddler Pro. Finding a few people to follow is not hard - the web is full of them. My feeds come from around 50 sources currently. No - I don't read them all - in fact I often have hundreds unread and so occasionally I purge the lot. But often I'll skim the headlines and go from there.

Twitter is another of those tools that I just couldn't do without. Not that I send a lot of tweets - but I send a few. But I do find the immediacy and shortness that 140 characters gives means that you get the message pretty quickly. Its also a great way to get a response to a question you have - just tweet your question and let the crowd respond. I also fond it useful to follow the hashtags for certain events - that way you get to see what others are talking about - related to the event.

The two of these tools work well with another favourite tool of mine - EverNote. EverNote is one of those tools that can be everywhere - I have it installed on my laptop, my iPad and my iPhone. It syncs with my RSS feeds via Feeddler Pro meaning I have access to all of my notes no matter what device I have. EverNote is far more than just a collection space though - you can share your notes and notebooks directly over the web and of course you can create audio and insert photos directkyminto your notes from an iPad - attach files etc, and clip pages from the web. I don't use anywhere near the number of features that it has, but being able to keep order to my RSS feeds that are worth keeping is great.

Of course, subject associations are a great place to learn. My subject has a useful website at NZACDITT, but of more value to me is the active discussion board they run via Google Groups. Most of these groups offer a range of automated updates via email - and I usually find one or two nuggets in each daily update - thanks to the contributions of others in the group!

Others that I use, but not as much as the above three, are LinkedIn, Symbaloo, Pinterest, NetVibes, Google+, Paper.li 

In the end - it doesn't much matter what you are using. What does matter is that you are using something and you are keeping up with the growing importance of digital competencies in your subject areas of choice.

It's happening all over again ... so much for the holidays!

So, having hung the curtains in #3's bedroom, put #4 to sleep (he's still only 2 after all) I thought I'd just sit down and have a cup of coffee before dealing to the issue of securing the TV in the motor home (hate it to fall off the wall while driving!) For that unknown reason opened my email while sipping the coffee, and for some reason just happened to read a message from someone joining a Diigo group that I am a member of ... and that's when it happened ...

Twine? Never heard of it before. Well 10 minutes later I now have a whole new PLN to get to grips with. Time will tell long term just how much use I make of the new tool, but at the moment it's given me a new avenue to explore ... and I just can't wait ... and just in case it's new to you too - try it, I think you'll like it...