In building my personal learning network, I have enjoyed diving deep into the abundance of resources available online for future lesson plans and laboratory investigations. While I do not typically feel comfortable about having a public online presence, I chose to create a Twitter account because there were so many relevant accounts, and I found resources that I didn’t even know I needed! On Twitter, I found accounts dedicated to providing underrepresented groups with opportunities to experience science in different capacities (conferences, scholarships, etc.), I found news for teachers about how to make science teaching more relevant to properly prepare our students for the future, and even found the official Next Generation Science Standards Twitter account, and am excited to incorporate more discussion of real-world phenomena in my classroom because of it.

Throughout the process of building this website, I was truly excited to collaborate in person with teachers at my school and in my network and even had teachers give me ideas for my blog. I truly saw and felt the desire in other teachers to collaborate and help each other in service of helping our students, and was motivated to make this PLN as accessible and user-friendly as possible, while also providing connections to high-quality and varied resources. I also took the initiative to reach out to other teachers in my graduate courses to ask if they wanted to contribute to my site, and if i could help with theirs, and in the process even got more Twitter accounts and blogs to follow! Again, the eagerness to share what they have created, as well as learn from other teachers showed that collaboration is something all teachers want. This digital PLN makes it easy to implement.

As I continue to grow my PLN, I will update this blog with additional resources I find. I hope to receive submissions of lesson materials/images from other educators and think that displaying them on my site would be an innovative way to start a discussion with others. I would also like to see submissions of images of effective teaching in classrooms, and this page could act as a motivational corner for us all. I plan to expand my PLN by creating posts with personal instructional strategies I use in my own classroom, and reflections on how my students responded to each strategy, and what I would change to improve the lesson. This way, teachers can have a personal reflection on how the lesson went, and can tailor the lesson to work for their students as well. I also want to incorporate a space dedicated to discussing differentiation in STEM education specifically. My curriculum currently leaves little opportunity for differentiation, and my differentiation strategies have much room for improvement. I aim to actively hunt out ways to make my classroom a space where 100% of my students are growing, and want to share what I find here.