I began taking classes at Walden in February of this year. I have never used the internet so much to learn and discover as I have in the last 4 months. My networks and contacts have grown tremendously since starting classes here at Walden. I have learned to search outside of the traditional “Google” and look for blogs, wikis, webinars and podcast that address the issues and concerns that I am looking to learn about. I use my RSS as the beginning point for learning. Whatever new topic comes into my RSS and I find interesting I will do more research to better understand what has been presented to me.
I have joined the distribution of articles and journals on the education topic. I download white papers for research and reference. I have registered with Harvard and read the week business newspaper. I have signed up with Trade groups and receive their articles and journals.
I have registered with a variety of networks on the internet to help me become more educated and stay abreast of the trends. I found a site called SimpleK12 that is geared towards the education field and they provide tools and training for a multitude of topics on combining the internet and the tools accessible to educators with their classroom curriculums. I use ASTD to join webinars for learning. I am part of Linkedin and I join in the discussion post that others have started. I have posted my own questions and used the response I have received to help expand our education department at my office.
I am so excited about all the new information I have gained. I have used these tools to help me do research on topics and questions that we share in our discussions as well as using this information at my place of employment. Connectivisim talks about constant flow of information and that this information can be a bit overwhelming for our memory to maintain. This is so true. There is so much to learn from the internet that it can be too much at times to remember. I have created files for saving all this new information so that I can reference it again at a later date and possibly use in postings and in my classrooms.
