Creating a Personal Learning Network (PLN)

Fall semester is off and running here at The University of Akron. I'm teaching one section of 5500:475, Instructional Technology Applications, again this semester. I really enjoy this class because I get to share all types of technology integration strategies with my students. This semester I am making a concerted effort to try and lecture from PowerPointlessness slides less and to try and facilitate more PBL and hands-on opportunities to learn during class time.

As I have gone through and started to revise my course materials, it seems like there is a lot of good content within all of my PowerPoint presentations, so I hate to ditch them completely. What I've decided to do is use my free SlideShare account to host my PPTs, which enables me to embed all of that important content within my course on UA's LMS (aka Springboard). I hope that way my students will be able to pull up the PPTs as needed when they are completing their class assignments.

I'm also toying with the idea of streaming all my lectures via my 5500:475 uStream.tv channel. Once those are archived, I'm thinking I can pull them into a video editor, extract the audio and mash it up with the PPTs on SlideShare via their Slidecast tool. I'll keep you updated on that project. For now, here's a new presentation I created to introduce my students to the idea of Personal Learning Networks and how they might create one of their own.

Creating a PLN

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: technology education)