Week 7

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For the purposes of Easter, we skipped Week 6.

This week is about reflection. Reflection on you, your use of twitter, and #pstn.

Over the previous 5 weeks you have been asked to participate in a range of tasks around Twitter designed to help you engage with #pstn. The HootCourse for #pstn provides a record of all the #pstn related tweets in that time.

Your task this week is to tweet some reflections about #pstn

  • Why were you interested in #pstn?
  • How have you contributed in #pstn?
  • What helped you, what hindered you, in terms of participating?
  • How might it be improved?

We’re listening.

Week 5

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This week is about participating in or at least observing a twitter chat event. These are valuable ways to find more relevant people to follow, and also easy ways to have your own questions answered promptly.

1. Choose a chat hashtag which is relevant to your subject area or area of interest, and which has a regular scheduled chat each week. This may require you to research the hosts/moderators in order to ascertain which time zone the chat will take place in, what the weeks topic is, and who participates in the chats. For example, #ozengchat takes Place every Tuesday at 8:30pm EST. If you’re in need of inspiration, a mega list of Twitter chat hashtags is here: http://www.cybraryman.com/edhashtags.html.

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Week 4

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Crowdsourcing solutions – using your network as a brains trust – is possibly one of the most awesome features of a PLN, no matter how small or new. So. Your task this week is a simple one:

1. Identify a problem you have – it might be with something you’re experiencing on prac, an assignment, trying to find a resource, a tough kid, a tech issue, or even just what to do if you’ve washed a red sock in a white load. It doesn’t matter, as long as you can phrase a request for a solution in 140 characters. Tweet your request and let the Twitterverse help you (don’t forget to use the #pstn hashtag – more people will see it).

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Week 3

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This week is about conversations. Broadcasting – feeding out information via tweets and blogs – is only half the story (although you could be forgiven for thinking it’s the whole story based on some business and media accounts…). A PLN needs interaction to survive, so this week is all about making connections. Your tasks are:

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Week 2

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Now that you’ve had some time to passively observe networking in action, it’s time to ditch the passive and get networking. So – your task for this week is:

1. Do some tweeting.

It’s up to you what form this takes – a general ‘hello’ to your followers and the project participants, a question or call for interesting resources, or just an observation about what’s going on in your life. Anything goes – there’s no rules about what’s important on Twitter. You can tweet from the Twitter website, from a Twitter app, from the Hootcourse widget in the sidebar or from the Hootcourse itself.

If you’re stuck for ideas or want to try and kick off some discussion, why not reply to somebody else’s tweet?

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Getting started

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#pstn will be kicking off next week – which means that the first ‘quest’ for those of you using the task structure will appear on Monday. To make things easy for you, you can subscribe to the quest feed using either RSS or email – check out the Quest Log page to get subscribing.

Call for participation: Pre-service teachers

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Pre-service or early-career teacher? Doing a BEd/BTeach/Dip. Ed or any other teaching course? We want you. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed, under-prepared, lost, excited, inspired or awesome about teaching, this project is for you. We’re running this project as a way to introduce pre- and early-service teachers to online networking and help fill in some of those (often huge) gaps between the unit codes and what actually happens in the classroom (more detailed info here), as well as share your work and ideas. It’s a low-commitment project that provides support for you to engage in online networking, in an organic way that fits around your study/work schedule. It’s not tied to any of your units or pracs and you’re not graded on it.

Why? Online networking provides the real-world support that uni courses don’t – resource sharing, problem solving, cries for help, kudos for awesome work and sympathetic people on tap.

To get involved, follow our How To Play getting started guide (it’s the same for both mentors and participants). Initially, joining the Hootcourse is all you’ll need to do to confirm your participation before the project kicks off in late February.

Call for participation: Mentors

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In-service teacher or educator of any flavour? We want you. #pstn is a project designed to introduce pre- and early-service teachers to online networking (more detailed info here). It uses a non-traditional mentor model – mentors are not allocated to participants on a 1-to-1 basis. Instead, we’re looking for a pool of mentors to interact, respond and guide on a completely ad-hoc basis, contributing what you can when you can. There’s no minimum or maximum time commitment and no requirement to be anyone’s ‘go-to’ person. It’s essentially just a committment to welcome a new group of people to your PLN and provide them with support.

To get involved, follow our How To Play getting started guide (it’s the same for both mentors and participants). Initially, joining the Hootcourse is all you’ll need to do to confirm your participation before the project kicks off in late February.