Week 8, Creating Personal Learning Networks

This blog is about a teacher who wants her students to set up personal learning networks. She wants to help them set up an aggregator and then seed them with a few feeds to get them started. Her plan is to get them comfortable and then have them find some feeds on their own of anything they are passionate about. This will go along with their personal blogs and they will be responsible for keeping up with theirs and commenting also on classmate’s feeds. The two goals of this idea are to help them foster critical thinking (and things along that line with in the curriculum) and to also help them establish their own learning network. She wants them to be able find trusted sources and to also learn how submit trusted sources themselves.

I think this is a great idea! I wish that my high school teachers had started something like this for me. This is such a different approach to learning and I am almost positive that it is effective. This idea is establishing skills for the students that they can essentially take with them to college and even further in life. I know that when I first started surfing the Internet for sources for projects and papers I trusted almost every source I found. I know it sounds silly but at that age I just didn’t know. I did not know how to tell the difference from a source that is legitimate and source that was not. I wish I would have had a project along these lines to help me. It would have been so useful and effective. Not only does this project sound useful it also sounds fun. I would have loved to be doing something like this in my high school classes. I really enjoyed reading this blog and I think this teacher is a very smart woman with great ideas!