Shep's World

Welcome back to Shep's World and this week I am going to talk to you about what I have learned about building up my Personal Learning Network. I have set out this year with the intention of strategically building up my PLN so that helps me grow according to the vision I am developing of me as an educator. The first thing I experienced was that the number of resources out there really can be quite overwhelming and I certainly haven't even began to scratch the surface of what is really available out there. As a matter of fact even Twitter alone can be quite overwhelming for me and how many hours I have wasted just browsing Facebook aimlessly is really quite depressing. In order to assist anyone who is new to building there PLN or people who are looking to expand their network I created a very simple infograph that I posted above and I will offer a few key pieces of advice that have served me well so far. The first piece of advice that I have offered in other blogs is quite s

Picture courtesy of : https://gamebooks.org/gallery/cyoa001n2.jpg Hello my friends and welcome back to Shep's World where I discuss my thoughts and personal development as an educator.  Lately I have been reflecting on the role of professional development on me as a classroom teacher. Many times professional development that is provided by our schools is less than ideal due to poor planning, lack of teacher buy in, or a variety of other issues. Not that I blame the school/district for these issues due to the fact that a one size fits all pathway to professional development is an unreasonable expectation for something that REALLY needs to be a very personal journey of self discovery for the individual teacher; however, if the schools didn't try to provide the PD in the first place how many teachers would simply not attempt it at all? My guess is honestly depressing and what is most depressing about it is that prior to this year I would have been that teacher that avoided P

     Photo Courtesy of:  https://cdn.makeawebsitehub.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/social_media.jpg Welcome back to Shep's World and this week I am going to talk about my continuing adventures in the field of Social Media in the context of education.  Never in my career prior to my class EDET 543 would I have ever considered using social media as a tool that I could use in my profession but every time I turn around it feels as if I am discovering some new use for social media. Whether I am talking about professional development, classroom and community management, or as an instructional tool that uses of social media in the classroom only seem limited by depth of my own creativity.  I have explored using Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Google+, and Pinterest  in the last few weeks and the number of applications I am still learning about is almost overwhelming so I am going to repeat advice that I was given to anyone who may be reading along and possibly feeling the same.  S