My Personal Learning Environment Reflection

How has your understanding of personal learning environments evolved?
Looking back at the first week, I truly had no idea what my Personal Learning Environment would look like. I also had no idea what it really was. I think that my understanding has evolved into more of a learning experience that is still very active even in this last week. I am still learning, my understanding is still evolving. I have learned more about what to expect in my own learning environment and learned it is simply that: a learning environment. I have learned that we make our Personal Learning Environment our own. We learn in different ways and we show that with these PLEs. I think that I have learned that we can use this however we want to in the ways of learning. I think that I have learned that it is important to guide learning in this environment such as Wendy’s push for me to collaborate with people outside of our class. I think that these parts of the assignment are very important and should not be overlooked. I have seen the importance of collaborating with others and now see how I can do the same for my own students. I have also learned that it is important to find other tools that you are not familiar with and incorporate them into the PLE. When I first started I chose a topic that interested me (dog training) and I see now the importance of relevant and authentic topics for my own students.

What next steps could be taken to implement personal learning environments in the classroom?
I think that the first step to implement PLEs into the classroom would be the issue of safety. I think that as a teacher we are responsible for educating our students in the safety concerns of the internet. The next step would be to choose a topic. I chose something that is important to me and therefore I worked really hard on this project. I see the importance of loving your topic or at least having an interest in it. I think that this is also very important for students. I see just how much I truly learned about different technology and collaborating by doing something I love. The next step would be to guide their learning, and I think that this would be kind of difficult but it was done well in our class. Each week we had a guided discussion on different aspects and then each week I would go out and find relevant sources for my PLE. I think that the next step would be assessment and that is what I will talk about in the next question.

In what ways can we evaluate PLEs?
I believe that this is the most difficult part of the whole assignment. I mean we have to show growth and so I think that the best way to do this is a pass/fail kind of thing because I think that every student’s work will be very different. So we have to judge whether they truly put in an effort to learn about their topic. I think that we should evaluate their work according to the guidelines that we put forth throughout the project and see how they met each of these things. I think that the way they organize things is also important and so we can look at their organization and see how they progressed. I think that a blog is also a great way to see their progress because you can require or suggest that they do some kind of reflection once and a while and that is a great way to see progress.