PLE Diagram and Comparison

Week 5

This week, after joining some Professional Learning Networks, I had to take all my social networking connections and create a diagram of my Professional Learning Environment. 

This is the image I chose to create to represent my Professional Learning Environment. The sharpies are represent the fact that even though all the sites and apps are different, they are still social networking sites. Just like all the highlighters are different, but part of the same pack.

I chose to split my PLNs into two categories: sharing and learning. When making a list of all my subscriptions and all the websites I have a log in to, the differentiation became clear. Half of the highlighters belong to websites that I go to frequently and involve an aspect of sharing. Of course, I can learn a lot of information from these sites, but I use them primarily to share information with other people. The other half are sites that I go to in order to learn something. Again, although I can and do sometimes share on these sites, I most often use them in order to gather information for personal and professional reasons.

 When reflecting on all the websites I actively participate in, I learned that my life revolves around either homework or social networking sites. Out of all these PLNs, I only used four of the ten before beginning the grad school adventure. Now, I feel more connected to teachers and leaders from all around the country and world.

Looking at the diagrams of six of my peers, Amanda, Kjersti, Kimmy, and Megan all shared the idea with my that out PLN's almost revolve around us in an equal measure. Amanda's diagram connects her idea to a bigger theme, just like my Sharpie pack. We have eight sites in common. She included search engines like Google and Chrome to the list. Kjersti had all of her elements being included under one central theme, like mine. We have six of our PLNs in common. She has some of the different blogging sites that I chose not to use. Kimmy's color palette mimics mine in the fact that they all revolve around her central character. We also have six of the same sites listed in our PLNs. Megan categorized her sites in four chunks, but still had them revolving around her without the sites connecting to one another. We had a few in common, but she added some additional sites that I would not have thought would be a PLN, but I can see how they may be a part of one.

Julian and Allison had their original categories, but had their sites and apps connecting to one another and linking to more than one category. We have a lot of the same PLNs listed. I could have done my design more like theirs because as I mentioned above, I use some of the apps for sharing, but classified as learning and vice versa.