Developing an Online Personal Learning Network

These are the slides from the presentation about personal learning networks that I gave at NCTIES. Under the slides I have included a few of the points that stressed in the session.

• Personal learning networks aren't about one social network platform. 
• Personal learning networks take time to develop.
• Personal learning networks can be as large or small as you want them to be. 
• Your personal learning networks will change over time.
• Everyone has something to share.

Wiffiti - Gather & Display Feedback via Text

Wiffiti is a service that allows you to receive text messages and display them on a screen. In fact, if you've been to a sporting event in the last year you may have seen Wiffiti in use. The display doesn't have to be a Jumbotron, it could be as small as your laptop screen projected on to a wall. Today, Wiffiti launched the beta of a free version for educators.

Wiffiti for schools offers a platform through which you can collect feedback from students and display that feedback in a manner similar to sticking Post It notes to a cork board. You can collect feedback from text messages or from Tweets on the web. You can also collect images that your audience sends to your Wiffiti board. The new free Wiffiti for schools includes a G-rated filter to keep out inappropriate comments and a "zap" feature to remove any comments you want to remove.

Wiffiti's free offering to educators is still in beta so you will have to register for an invite to use the service.

Applications for Education
Wiffiti is kind of like Wallwisher for collecting and posting messages from a variety of devices. You could use Wiffiti to have a classroom full of students quickly share what they know about a topic or ask questions about material from class. You could also use Wiffiti to have your students vote on a question. Give the class a question, have them submit there responses, then eliminate all but the most popular three and vote on those. By the way, you can also do a similar voting activity in Socrative which was a big hit in one of my workshops today at NCTIES.

Two Years Later This Pattern Still Exists

I spent today at the NCTIES conference working with educators and talking with educators. One pattern that I heard throughout many of my conversations, and this happens everywhere I go, is "our school bought product X, but I'm the only one using it." As I wrote two years ago, buying stuff doesn't fix problems. Without instruction for teachers on the classroom of technology, putting a laptops, iPads, or SMARTBoards in every classroom won't improve students' learning experiences.