It all started when I read "The Element" by Sir Ken Robinson. I started thinking about gifted programs, ones that incorporated 5 major elements:
1) Teacher facilitated
2) Great Groups (either in person or via cyber-space) - Other gifted peers
3) Mentors
4) Inquiry based projects
5) Assessment that includes: the journey, social networking experiences, great group experiences and final product.
I stumbled across Personal Learning Networks. See "Personal Learning Network" below.
I read an article by Ng and Nicholas that talked about ten 14 year olds who are gifted in three countries that they did a study on. This article is: A Progressive Pedagogy for Online Learning With High-Ability Secondary School Students: A Case Study
In this article they talked about www.moodle.com, which is an online classroom tool used to get students to participate in online learning. Check on the video about what Moodle is all about. See "Moodle" below.
There is so much out there, so to keep your PLN (personal learning network) organized you can use Symbaloo, an online bookmarking tool. See "Welcome to my PLE!" below.
On this presentation, she uses many Web 2.0 tools. One is a blog similar to this one. Another is glogster. Basically it is a poster-making tool that is incredibly easy to use. My glog!
The best part about Personal Learning Networks is the ability to find people in your field of interest. This is also one of the most challenging things to do. You can find people who are interested in your topics in many different ways:
1) Joining a listserv
2) Using facebook to search for interest groups.
3) Use Twitter - once you create a twitter account, you can use # to find people who are writing on your topic or you can use @ to find people who are leaders in your topic. Sometimes it is best to visit the website belonging to the professional you are trying to contact to see if they have a facebook and/or twitter account. You can check out my twitter at: Follow me on Twitter
*It takes a long time to build connections. You also have to be careful that you are actually making connections with the right people and not making connections with people that will give you useless information. Fortunately almost any information is at the tips of your fingers, all you have to do is play.
