Course Reflection

How has your understanding of personal learning environments evolved?    

After taking this course on Personal Learning Environments, I could only wish that my professors and even middle and high school teachers would have allowed us to create and learn in similar ways.  In such a fast paced world, it is hard to organize and synthesize the world around us unless we take initiative to become active learners.  It is difficult to find a way to organize and understand all of the information that is thrown at us each and every day.  Creating and maintain a PLE helps shape the mold the information we want to know into a convenient package the we can easily access and change whenever we want. 

My understanding of PLE’s will help me not only as an individual searching through websites, blogs, and social network sites but also in the classroom.  My new understanding of PLE’s will not only help me navigate through daily life on the internet, but also as I teach my students in the classroom.  I feel very comfortable with the idea of allowing students to create their own PLE’s in order to assist them with their studies.  

I am very happy I participated in this class under the direction of Wendy Drexler & Christopher Sessums. The class was very informative and fun at the same time!           

Given your experience through this course and activities associated with it, what steps can you take as an educator to implement personal learning environments in your classroom practice? 

I am very excited to implement PLE’s into my classroom after having so many positive experiences in this class.  The opportunity to create and manage an online blog in which other students could communicate with me was a helpful component.  Currently, my school uses Moodle and I allowed my speech students to post reflections and comments on a forum after their last speech.  They could then read the reflections of other students and give advice and praise.  My students love communicating with their classmates through the online forum and they were excited to complete the assignment instead of the traditional pen and paper way.

I also had my speech class create Symbaloo accounts to organize their research and thoughts for an extemporaneous speech topic.  My students again were excited to create a Symbaloo page and use it throughout their research and writing process.  I plan to continue introducing resources such as Symbaloo and blogs into my classroom.

In what ways can we evaluate PLEs?

Evaluating a PLE might seem difficult at first since the students are creating their own individual product.  However, I believe that with clear objectives before a student embarks on creating a PLE would help any educator evaluate the criteria for the learning environment.  For example, I had my students summarize what research and websites that found helpful after each class period on our online forum.  Classmates could then find helpful tricks and hints from their classmates as they navigated through their own PLE.