I was doing some e-tutoring for The University of Dresden recently, working with a great bunch of PhD students looking into digital literacies together. The group were really mixed, with engineers, forestry, medical and humanities students all in the same group. In the final week of the course I wanted to encourage them to create their own Professional Learning Network (PLN) so that after the course they would become more autonomous as learners and hopefully pick up new digital lietracies as they went along.

I wanted to show them a simple video to start off the week’s learning that would define PLNs in general terms. Try as I might, every single video I could find on YouTube was aimed squarely at teachers, or educators (and many of those were aimed at language teachers, too!)

So cutting a long story short, I decided to make my own video which in under five minutes could explain in clear terms:

• What a PLN is – and why it’s worth having
• Things students should consider before setting one up
• Some basic web-based tools that will help you get started

8 hours later, after lots of cutting clips, editing audio,  shunting slides about to fit the narration, the final product is here.

Please really do feel free to use this with your students, trainees and colleagues – I made it using a Creative Commons license deliberately so that other folk could also use it. The only thing I ask is that you kindly credit me as the author of it

So, like I said at the end of the video: Let’s try to get as many useful PLN connections going on as possible in our network. I’m @SethDickens if you want to connect on Twitter, alternatively, if you have any other questions, queries or are looking for help in setting up a PLN, do please ask away by posting a comment in reply to this post!

Related posts:

1. My Students’ Social Science Video
2. Podcasting with Language Learners
3. Best of the BETT – Part 2

Image made from an original Creative Commons photo by: Anamorphic Mike

Basically, as a (relatively) young dad, I want to make sure that I am at present as possible in my daughters lives, while at the same time trying to make sure we have a regular income. As I already mentioned, this means that blogging is not one of my first priorities, as It’s done for free, yet takes heaps of time, which is a shame, as I feel I’ve learnt a lot writing these posts and reading your comments. The steady readership numbers shows me that people who follow this blog will feel the same. so what’s the solution?

Click “More”to find our my plans, after the jump:

I’ve turned down countless offers to blog commercially, when companies basically pay you to talk about their products. It just felt wrong, I think it has also got the derogatory nickname “Astroturfing.” I’ve also been offered a couple of times to hand over control of the blog to the company which would write articles and post them on my behalf. Yeeurghh! That sounds even worse!

So, I’ve come up with a couple of ideas which I’m going to be trying out over the next few months as a bit of an experiment. Basically, I have decided to start up my own little educational technology shop, which I’m going to stock purely with tools that I have used, like, look interesting or cool and are in some way noteworthy and get my seal of approval. Each time I review a new EdTech product I’m going to post it to my blog, and obviously link to it in my little shop. This way, hopefully I’ll be able to share some of the cool little tools that I’ve found and which over time have become essential to me in my teaching role. Oh and of course, if you like any of the stuff, you can buy it and a tiny weeny commission (maximum 15%) will come to me. Seems like a win-win situation, hey?

I have no expectations whatsoever of getting rich from this, I’d be surprised even if it will pay for more than a couple of pizzas a week, but it will give me impetus to write more often and hopefully will also provide a useful service to the EFL and MFL language teaching communities.

You, my dear reader, and your thoughts are important to me on this though. Is this likely to be interesting to you? Is the commercial side of this going to be annoying, or off-putting to you, or do you think that the added reviews, news and so on that I’ll be encouraged to post will provide an additional service to you? DO PLEASE  let me know your thoughts in the comments section – I’d love to hear from you!

Best,

Seth.

For the past few years Google has been running a Google Teacher Academy, where it invites a group of 50 educators to its offices for an intense day of training, input and new resources. I originally heard about this year’s Academy at the BETT 2012 show. Dana Nguyen’s talk about becoming a Google certified teacher was pretty inspirational, so as a teacher (and perhaps more importantly teacher-trainer) I decided that this year I’m going to apply to attend. I guess I hope that knowing more about Google and its tools like Google Apps for Education will allow me to provide more meaningful seminars which will be cheaper for schools to implement and which will be simpler for my trainees to adapt to their teaching.

In its application page to join the Academy, Google says that it’s looking for teachers who are:Google Certified Teachers are:

• Exceptional educators with a passion for using innovative tools to improve teaching and learning.
• Creative leaders who understand their local needs and can spread innovation as a recognized expert.
• Ambassadors for change who model high expectations, life-long learning, collaboration, equity & inclusion, and innovation.

all of which I strive to be at all times, hopefully as successfully as possible.

As part of the application process, all potential participants, must upload a short 1 min video to YouTube, or Google video, explaining why they wish to be a Google teacher. Seeing as I’ve done a bit of work using video with my learners in the past, I thought that this would be a fun challenge, so I set about recording a video yesterday. What you see below is the result. I must admit I’m pretty pleased with how it come out, although there are certainly things I might still change, I think after a while you have to stop being a perfectionist and just say: “yes this has reached a decent enough standard.”

Thanks again to my friends and colleagues on Facebook and Twitter who suggested a couple of tweaks to the original video to make it snappy, and a little more logical. So what do you think, would you invite me to the Google Academy?

if you fancy joining this year’s Academy, it’s in London on the fourth and fifth of April 2012. You can find all the details and apply online here at the Google Teacher Academy page. But hurry though, there’s only six more days in which you can apply!