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Rethinking Learning - Barbara Bray \ Tag: personal learning network

Rethinking Learning

Let's challenge ourselves to bring joy, creativity and innovation into personalized learning environments every day. We can rethink the way learning is approached and taught.
What is Personalized Learning? Click here to learn more and download your free chart!

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Tag: personal learning network

30
May 16, 2012 Posted by Barbara Bray in Change, Educational Models, Learning Environments, Personalized Learning

Stages of Personalized Learning Environments (updated)

Stages of Personalized Learning Environments (V2)by Barbara Bray and Kathleen McClaskey

In attempting to transform teaching and learning to personalized learning, consider where you are currently and envision which stage you can see feasible for your school, district or community.

The Stages of Personalized Learning Environments (PLE) Version One chart needed to be updated. Why? Because of the considerable feedback we received after posting our first version of the chart. Some of the feedback was about consistency and flow across the stages. What worked in what stage?

We definitely want to thank those that critiqued the stages for us and helped us with this version two. Some districts shared with us that our version one was going to be their foundation of their personalized learning initiative. We wanted to refine it so it was clear, consistent, and easily understood. We went to work to update the stages for them and anyone else moving to a personalized learning environment.

Please feel free to download version two and let us know how it supports your transformation to personalizing learning.

Download the chart below for free: http://eepurl.com/fLJZM


Link to Slideshare of Stages of Personalized Learning Environments v2

Some questions to consider before embarking on your journey to personalize learning:

  • Why do you want to personalize learning for your learners?
  • What problems or needs have you identified in your school, organization and/or community?
  • What data can you show that demonstrates the need to personalize learning?
  • What does teaching and learning look like now?
  • What are stakeholders beliefs about learning and change?
  • Why is it critical for your organization and/or community to change now?
  • What challenges or obstacles do you envision as you move to personalizing learning?
  • What do you envision for your personalized learning environment?


These questions showed us that there are different stages of personalizing learning. Personalizing learning for all learners means understanding the different stages of personalized learning environments (PLE).

All feedback is welcome and appreciated. Most of the comments have been through email, on Scoopit and other social media. We are keeping a link to the slideshare of Version One here for your reference.Stages of personalized learning environments (version one) originally published on May 7, 2012- 
Tags: assessment, Competency-based, learner-centered, personal learning network, personalized learning, project-based, self-directed
2
June 23, 2011 Posted by Barbara Bray in 21st Century Skills, Change, Learning Environments, Online Learning Communities, Professional Development

Your PLN helps your PLC become a CoP

Learning can happen anywhere at anytime from anyone and anything. Your connections and any information you use are learning experiences that can help you grow personally and professionally. I wrote this article for CUE in 2009 and felt it was appropriate to update it for the ISTE 2011 Conference in 2011.  I’ll be there — very busy but learning so much from the people in my PLN.

Personal Learning Network (PLN)

There is nothing new about PLNs. They are the people and information sources that help you meet your learning goals. Building your PLN means that you not only seek to learn from others but you also help others in the network learn. Anyone can make a contribution. Your PLN can be your most powerful learning tool no matter what the subject. My PLN used to be the people I met face-to-face: the people I worked with, classes I took or taught, friends and family, organizations I joined and the information was what I googled on the Internet, in books, textbooks, or periodicals at the library. Remember how long it used to take to find what you were looking for?

Now my PLN connects me to others and to information in ways I never thought possible a few years ago. I still use Google to search for information but now I can find trends, maps, and even literature reviews. Social networks connect me to friends, work contacts, and friends of friends. I can see what they are doing in Twitter, updates on their conversations and links to new information. Facebook not only updates the status of each of my connections, I can join groups set up by friends and learn from wall posts. Here’s a diagram of some of my PLN:

Personal Learning Network

Use a mindmapping program such as Inspiration or Mindmeister to diagram your own PLN.

So how can your PLN help you build your Professional Learning Community (PLC)?

Your PLN can help you meet your personal and/or professional learning goals. A PLC is where you focus on student learning. Your PLC focuses on a specific problem area of the students in your school. Richard DuFour shares three critical questions that drive the work of the PLC:

  • What do we want each student to learn?
  • How will we know when each student has learned it?
  • How will we respond when a student experiences difficulty in learning?

We know a teacher can make a difference to the children in their classroom. However, a school may find many of the children in the entire school are falling through the cracks. The teachers in the school as a PLC can collaborate to improve or restructure how they reach at-risk students. They can analyze student data reviewing patterns and trends. Each teacher can use their PLN to research background information about specific issues brought to light from the data analysis, to ask questions of others in similar situations, to connect with other classrooms for global collaborations, and to share the findings from their PLC.

The PLC becomes a Community of Practice (CoP)

The CoP is where you take what you learned in the PLC and transfer it to practice where teachers can work together to do action research and/or lesson study. The teacher can ask “What does it take for me to change my practice to include this new learning?” This is deep, thoughtful work involving modeling new methodologies, observations from another teacher or coach, reflections on the results and process by asking what worked, what didn’t work.

Your PLN connects you to other professionals and to the information that will help you with your work in your PLC and CoP. Not only will the PLN help you, you can use your PLN to share best practices, blog reflections, and post examples of student work.

Tags: Change, collaboration, community of practice, connections, personal learning network, plc, PLN, professional learning community, teaching practice