First PLC Meetings

We had our first PLC meeting during our staff development days.  First, we focused on formulating our goals.  As a group, we decided for the first six weeks our focus would be on Skype/webcams, Snowball Mics, and incorporating technology into our student centers.  We will also find a location for a "Making Connections" map.  After continued conversation, we realized that as individuals we all have different needs within the common goal.  Overall, our individual goals will be to incorporate more technology in centers, set-up accounts Blogger, Skype, Evernote, Diigo, Story Robe, and MORE! We agreed to communicate through various forms of technology within our group at least once every two weeks.  Next, we participated in three different  virtual meetings. Josh Allen reminded us to focus on the content, not the technology tool.  He introduced various ways to use technology to better yourself as an educator, such as social bookmarking and Twitter.  Avivia Dunsigner gave us a wide array of technology resources that she has implemented with her students during centers.  For example, she uses Evernote for assessment and documentation.  She gave us examples of how she uses these tools to meet the needs of her lower ability students, as well as tips in keeping centers managable for the teacher.  Dennis Grice's main point was to start with your learning goal and then think about what will be the best tech tool for implementation.  Everyone really wants to try out his rapid-fire progressive story idea in conjunction with Storybird.  "Learning should be fun, if it's not you're not doing it right!"  This hit home with all of us.  We also used the templates provided to document our goals.  After that, we created the norms that will assist us in making our PLC beneficial to all members.  Lastly, we took some time for hands-on exploration to familiarize all with the new initatives of the group.  For example, we wrote this post collaboratively to experiment with the options within Blogger. In conclusion, we had a very successful first meeting!  We look forward to continued learning and are excited about Teaching4Tomorrow!