The Gifted Kids Network

Apr 04 2008

Personal Learning Communities

Published by michelle at 9:41 am under Gifted and Technology

A learning community can mean any number of things, such as extending classroom practice into the community; bringing community personnel into the school to enhance the curriculum and learning tasks for students; or engaging students, teachers, and administrators simultaneously in learning. Personal Learning Communities help learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes providing support for learners to: set their own learning goals; manage their learning; managing both content and process; communicate with others in the process of learning; and thereby achieve learning goals. For gifted students, personal learning communities enable students to select an area of strength, interest or passion and surround themselves with information, mentors, experts, and resources in that area. The Internet provides a great many resources for gifted students to create their own personal learning communities. Teachers need to be familiar with the high quality, media rich, and internet sources available for students to utilize.

Carol Fertig, has listed many great educational podcasting sites in her blog post Podcasts for Gifted Kids . University professors are creating podcasts of their lectures and making them available on the Internet. ITunes has a library of free university podcasts. Student-created podcasts can be heard at The Education Podcast Network and at LearningInHand.There are also many sources for video learning for students, The Smithsonian, OE Commons, PBS, The Discovery Channel, The History Channel, and Teaching History with Technology. Internet searches on the topic of your choice will result in many additional quality resources. RSS feeds allow quick scanning of the latest headlines from hundreds of Web sites. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary). By clicking on the RSS information icon, students can use the URL to subscribe to the feed with their RSS reader/aggregator. Several types of free readers are available: Web-based readers, desktop readers, and readers via Web browsers. Popular Web-based readers include Bloglines, My Yahoo!, and NewsGator. Students can use RSS feeds and aggregators to create their own news gathering sources. News feeds provide rich content in areas of interest. Yahoo News, CBS News, Reuters, NPR, and ABC are just a few national feeds. Each of these services offers specific feeds in areas of technology, politics, world news, national news, money, health, entertainment and more. Many local news services also offer RSS feeds.

Students can also use RSS feeds and aggregators to read blogs of experts in their areas of interest. Technorati is a blog search engine. Students can search for blogs on topics of interest and then subscribe to the blogs using their aggregator. As with all Internet activities, teachers and parents should exercise caution. Younger students should be closely supervised when searching for videos, blogs or news feeds as many sites contain adult content. Older students should be taught proper Internet safety so that they know what to do when they accidently come across content that is questionable or inappropriate. Using the internet to create personal learning communities increase opportunities for learning for gifted students with unique interests. Teachers need to be knowledgeable in this area and help students to create their own personal learning communities.

As you know, my interest is in using technology in gifted education. My personal learning community includes:

Social Networking Gifted2.0 , Classroom2.0,

Blogs Cool Cat Teacher, Weblogg-ed 2cents Worth, The Gifted Exchange, Steve Hargadon, Gifted Child Quarterly, Prufrock Press Gifted Child Information, The Fischbowl, The More Child, Unwrapping the Gifted,