My Personal Learning Network...Baby Steps

Angela Maier's blog talks about what people can do when they feel as though they are drowning in social media. And to a certain extent, during this CE5160 course, I felt like I was drowning at times. It was tough to keep up with my readings, my assignments, my blog entries, reading classmates' blogs, commenting, and trying to build a personal learning network at a moment in my career where I am making a transition from the classroom to the front office.

But as I consider the Personal Learning Network I tried to establish,  I will follow Maier's suggestions:

Find your friends. There are literally hundreds of millions of people occupying this space.  The key to your success is finding people most relevant to you. Go slow, chose these friends and fans wisely as they will become your most important asset in this new world.

Chose three (3) tools that maximize your productivity and ensure you are getting what you need from the network.There are hundreds of tools, but when building your base, less is often more.

Finally, commit to three (3) actions; steps that you will repeat and sustain every day until they become action-based habits.

Go slow, and choose wisely. Based on a suggestion from Professor Tufts, I added Connected Principals to my Feedly feed. The benefits of having this site as part of my PLN is the diverse group of contributing principals. In their own words: This blog is the shared thoughts of school administrators that want to share best practices in education. All of the authors have different experiences in education but all have the same goal; what is best for students.

And as I step into my new role as principal, I've also considered how living and working in the Global Education City has isolated me, somewhat, from Korean culture and the language. It is the point of the GEC to give students an English-only environment, but I feel that I'm missing out on Korean life and culture.

I realize that I acquired more Spanish speaking skills in the first two years I lived in south Texas than I have acquired Korean language skills in the two years I've been here. I think that as a principal, it's important that I learn to better communicate with parents and not just rely on the office staff to translate. And so I've also added two sites to my PLN that relate to Korean language and culture.

To help me learn Korean (in baby steps), I'm going to rely on Talk to Me in Korean, a blog recommended by some colleagues, and one that I've just discovered in the past couple of weeks.
And to better relate to the students, I've found Eat Your Kimchi, which should help me better navigate the world of KPop, especially since the Grade 4 and 5 students are so consumed with these groups.

Here's a sample from Eat Your Kimchi, just so that you can see that I can get a quick idea of what is going on with one of the groups the students follow...

And as for blogging, I think after this course, I'm going to make some changes to this blog (or just start another) that will focus on my role as a principal as I try to navigate between two cultures. There is a good book, Confucius Meets Piaget, by Jonathan Borden, and even a blog associated with it (although not really updated, and so not very helpful for an on-going PLN) my colleagues and I will be discussing at the new teacher orientation at the beginning of August. I think, perhaps, that this will be a new starting point for me. Perhaps I will call my blog Prugh Meets Confucius and Piaget?