Personal Learning Networks & Today's Connected Student
Personal Learning Networks (PLN)
Your personal learning network is a variety of sources that you use to grow and develop as person. Today our networks rely heavily around the internet and its many services. You can look back to times before the internet and our personal networks would have looked very different. It would have consisted primarily of books and people. Today we still use these same types of sources we just access them in a different way. We still learn a lot from other people, only we no longer have to be face to face. The internet has created a venue where all different kinds of people can connect from anywhere in the world. The toughest part is that there is so much information it is sometime difficult to find the valuable resources. Luckily there have are many different programs created to find, sort, organize, and share information online. As a teacher and student I have found many of these programs useful and they together have helped me use the internet as a resource. Below you will find the main applications and platforms that I have used to create my Personal Learning Network.
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Today's Connected Student
From a very young age today's children will be using the internet. Which means that they are creating their very own learning networks whether they know it or not. So what does it mean for today's students and for us as teachers? I think there are both negatives and positives. A major positive is Students have access to more information than ever before. We are already seeing extremely talented and smart young people as a result. I think that is very exciting and the sky is the limit with all the opportunities today's students have. With that being said I think that there are some downfalls to how connected our students are. The major negative that I see is that they are always connected and have no time away from it. There are new problems that are going to arise from how connected people are and we are already seeing it. One that is becoming more and more common are mental health issues that arise from social media. What happens is people tend to use social media to exaggerate how great all the things in their life are. People see how great everyone's life seems on social media and question their own happiness, which has been linked to a lot of depression. This is just one example that I have heard of but with how connected we are becoming these types of things will continue to come up. Below is an example of just how connected today's students have become. What I tried to create focus on was the fact even our connections with people and traditional resources are being changed and impacted by technology.
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