- Welcome Back! Week of April 12

Welcome Back Rock Stars,

Welcome to our new Weekly Activity Blog! I will no longer use the Glog to communicate our weekly activities. The Blog allows more flexibility and will allow everyone to participate in our professional development (by commenting). I have decided to call it the Passage PLN Blog.

I'm sure you remember how we began the school year by Tweeting at the movies. I challenged each of you to begin a blog and to have your students post a few times throughout the course of the school year. Thanks for your efforts with trying something different for our students.

I knew then that I wanted to do a blog for the staff (we had a lot of fun that day). The trouble was, I could not see how I could make it purposeful. It took a week of rest and reflection to find the purpose. I want to use the blog to do my weekly Activity Calendar and provide PD via introducing you to a PLN. What is a PLN? A PLN is a Professional Learning Network (or Personal Learning Network).

In a nutshell, it's professional development on demand and from people from all over the world! I spent the latter part of my Spring Break reflecting on my practice and how I would be better professionally tomorrow than I was yesterday (the two questions from Daniel Pink). Here is a quick video that summarizes what a PLN is:

My next challenge to you as professional educators is to join me on a quest to be better tomorrow than we are today by learning from each other and from other professionals around the globe with similar interests. Here are the first steps:

1. Social networking is the quickest way to learn from other people. Let's start by building your PLN. Follow me on Twitter . Click here or click on the icon to the right. I know many of you did this in the beginning of the school year. I blocked most of you after the movie because I was unsure how I would use it. I've never made a mistake before..
   
2. Check out my Twitter feed to the right of this post. I will retweet useful information from my PLN for you. Click on a link to something of interest to you. I am sure you will find something interesting.

One of the things that came out of our climate survey was my keeping you on the cutting edge of instructional practice. I am looking forward to us learning together, having an awesome last quarter and celebrating how smart our kids are because we gave them smart stuff.

Birthday Shout Outs- Ms. Richardson- 4/7, Ms. Glover & Ms. Harwood- 4/10, Ms. Dixon- 4-11