A Meeting with a Member of My PLN

I've been on Spring break this week and have been enjoying the time off. However, I never completely stop thinking about technology or connecting with my personal learning network (PLN). When I attended TeachMeet Nashville virtually on Friday, April 1, I began tweeting with several other attendees. Before I knew it I was tweeting with the founder of TeachMeet Nashville, Jason Bedell and Nancy Blair(a member of my PLN) about hosting a TeachMeet in Louisiana. People who have been to TeachMeet like to call it the unconference. TeachMeet (un)conferences happen all over the world. They are put on by teachers, for teachers, at no cost to the teachers.

Well Nancy and I found out that we would both be in Mississippi on the same day this week, so we set up a face-to-face meeting to discuss founding a TeachMeet in our respective areas. Nancy has experience as a conference planner and she knows the steps that help insure a successful event. She is planning to have TeachMeet Georgia in the fall, while I will be hosting TeachMeet Louisiana in the Spring of 2011. We met for about two hours and got a rough outline together. How cool is that. Both Nancy and I gladly gave our free time to work on events that will hopefully hook other educators into the wonderful world of technology.

DEN Virtual Conference at Bissonet Plaza

On Saturday, April 24, Alexis Western and I hosted an in person event for the DEN Spring Virtual Conference at my school. Since it was the first day of Spring break for the teachers in our district, we decided to delay the start time until nine o'clock. We had a small intimate group but thoroughly enjoyed the day.

Alexis ad I showed the attendees how to register and then log in on their own laptops. We demonstrated the various features of the WebEx interface and encouraged them to chat with the other virtual attendees. We took a break when our catered lunch arrived from Chez Nous. During lunch we started talking about our personal learning network (PLN) and the power of Twitter. All of us on Twitter made sure we were following each other and tweeted about our event. We also explained the process for becoming a DEN STAR. Several of the teachers in attendance said they were going to apply.

We also spent time helping each other with our Promethean flipchart project that is due before the end of the school year and discussing our plans for learning over the summer. I had a wonderful day, learned plenty of new things, and added some awesome members to my PLN. I hope that is true for all who attended. Thanks for coming.