My Personal Learning Network

All good teachers have a professional learning community.  It starts with the people that we work with that we admire and can go to for advice.  Here are my top three:
1.  My librarian/media specialist:  As a former teacher, my school media specialist really understands the needs of teachers.  She knows that technology is just one of many tools for a teacher to use.  She also understands the time that good technology integration takes and that our time as teachers can be very limited.  
2.  My school's computer teacher:  As a person who teaches technology to grades four through eight, the school computer teacher has many skills and a wider view than mine of the impact of technology in the middle grades.  She first introduced me to Edmodo, a education networking site. 
3.  My next door teaching neighbor:  The teacher next door to me was my assigned mentor when I first came to work at my school twelve years ago.  She is an amazing teacher.  Despite the fact that we now teach different grade levels, she is a person that I can go to with nearly any teaching dilemma.  Although she does not use much technology, she is adept in many other areas.
A teacher's professional learning community also lies in the readings we find.  In this day and age, most of my professional reading comes from educational websites and blogs.  My top three electronic mentors are:
1.  Hello Literacy!  Jenn Jones (no relation) is a literacy specialist at Lake Myra Elementary School in Raleigh, North Carolina.  She has been a literacy mentor to me for two years.  Lately, she has blogged about how she uses technology to improve literacy instruction as well.
2.  Runde's Room  Jennifer Runde is known for her "Math Journal Sunday" posts where she explains and shows an example of how she uses foldables and interactive Math journals. The posts are full of pictures and downloadable templates.  The visuals in  her blog enhances her ideas and makes them easier to understand.
3.  Lucy Calkins  Lucy Calkins is the director of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University’s Teachers College.  This organization has existed for more than twenty-five years. TCRWP has both developed teaching methods and provides professional development.    She is my mentor for teaching writing because of her complete view of writing.  Her books explain in detail how to set up a writing workshop and run both whole-class instruction and individual conferring.  They even encompasses assessment.
Professional resources form an important part of my personal learning network.  Some of my favorites are:
1.  Laura Chandler  Laura is a prolific creator of both free and for-profit teacher resources.  She has created a wide variety of resources in several subject areas.
2. Emily Kissner  Author Emily Kissner's expertise is reading comprehension.  She posts her activities regularly on Teachers Pay Teachers and is an active blogger as well.  
3.  Technology Rocks  The author of this website scours the webs for free sites with activities that match different topics and themes that elementary teachers teach.  About once a month, the author shares these websites by theme.
4.  Manga High, Ten Marks, and ScootPad  These Math websites marry assessment and personalized instruction.  Teachers can assign activities, quizzes,and games.  The site keeps track of the students score and, in come cases, suggests next steps.  I want to use these sites more to individualize my teaching.                     
5.  Online support to implement the Common Core State Standards  Several states and sites are popping up to help teachers implement the CCSS.  Some of my favorites are from North Carolina, New York, and a private company, Mastery Connect, that I have blogged about before.
Three topics that I would like to research further are:
1.  Smarter Balanced The upcoming "Smarter Balanced" assessment will be used to evaluate students and teachers in twenty states beginning as early as next year (2014).  It promises to be an assessment where teachers will get some data within a matter of days in order to inform instruction.  The assessment will also include open response questions where students as young as third grade will type in their answers.  Since this test will replace our high- stakes state assessments and be used to evaluate my teaching, I am interested in learning all I can about this new assessment.
2. My Digital Identity  As part of my Master's degree courses, I have learned how to create digital videos, blog, websites, and create podcasts.  I hope to continue to adopt new ways to combine these methods and integrate documents as well as link between them. I also want to see how advances like Web 2.0, Google Docs/Drive, and Glogster can improve student achievement. Ladybug's Teacher Files is a great resource for doing this.
3.  Tablets, iPads, Smartboards, and iPhones  I definitely want to learn more about how these devices can be used in the classroom.  My district has been very slow to adopt technology.  We currently have none of these devices available.  But I am sure we will in the future and I want to make a case for them.