Modeling a PLN for Students

In the first Ed tech class I ever took we learned about Web Quests. A Web Quest was a guided internet activity.  A big part of designing a web quest is finding resources that the students can use and showing the students how to get to the resources.

We never called what we were doing "curating" but when we found the resources of value and then used hyperlinks to put those resources within our student's grasp and we used text to describe why the resource had value we were curating.

Now some 12 years later, web 2.0 tools have automated much of curation, (a word my spell check does not yet know) and there are more ways to organize and tag web resources than ever before.  If I was supposed to use a web quest to teach my students to navigate the web 12 years ago, what kind of tools have been developed to meet the web's expanded functionality?

This is where I am using the concept of a Personal Learning Network to teach my students about digital citizenship.

What is PLN? PLN stands for Personal Learning Network.  It can be used to refer to an actual site you use to interact with others, such as the Educators PLN.  I often use the term PLN to refer to a way of interacting with the internet.  When I am engaged in my PLN I might have several browser windows open Claco, Twitter, and Diigo, for example. I am finding resources others have already annotated and shared on Diigo, I am assembling them into a binder on Diigo and I am running searches on twitter to find other resources to include.

Teaching students to use these strategies can help them transform how and why they use the internet.  Students may be "digital natives" but has anyone in their lives talked to them about tagging and fileneame conventions?

Before I turn my students loose into the world of digital resources, I give them a guided experience.  Using Livebinders.com, I develop a pre-made PLN, complete with web 2.0 discussion tool Todays Meet.


You can see that each resource has it's own tab.  The Kidblog page helps the students get to their blog.  The shmoop and Mythweb sites are there to assist in comprehension challenges.  I have included a link to the Butler translation to allow students to compare translations.

I also included a couple "resources" in the binder that I may not use in class, like the game and the rap.  Even after the first day students came in and told me they liked these pages.  I always load some good but extra content in because if a student wants to explore more there should be more available to engage them.

My students seem to have taken to the idea of the livebinders quickly.  I showed them a Graphic Novel adaptation of the Odyssey in class and one of their first questions was "Will that be on the Livebinder?"

The next step in PLN instruction will be to walk the students trough my process of finding and evaluating resources and giving them a reason to build a binder of their own.

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