The three blogs I have selected to follow are College and Career Readiness & Success Center, Go Financial Aid, and First Generation Students. These three blogs appeal to the type of work I do with my students and the type of resources I seek out for them.
The College & Career Readiness & Success Center @ American Institutes for Research contains so much great information about current trends in Career Readiness. I chose to follow this blog because it talked a lot about technical careers and bridging the gap in education to better equip our students. This is something of great concern to me as a I prepare high school students with a post-secondary plan after graduation. I am also interested in the data that is represented in the blog posts about technical skills needed for jobs in demand. I look forward to utilizing this blog to help students map out a efficient plan.
The Go Financial Aid Blog sparked my interests because of the topics that are somewhat outside of the scope of traditional Aid topics. This blog included topics such as: Dealing with Natural Disasters and Financial Aid, Financial Aid for an Online Education and Private Colleges Willingness to Give. These topics are great for my students because they tackle real life issues and concerns about funding their education. I look forward to reading more about other financial aid ins and outs.
The First Generation Students Blog is awesome because it indeed is a major part of the population I serve. I chose to follow this blog because the posts are from real students who are currently faced with various challenges as First Generation Students. I especially gravitated toward the "Handling Pressure of Others Expectations" and "Advice for Rural Students Adjusting to Urban College" posts. This blog will allow me to share real stories with my students to help them understand the adjustment period and challenges and concerns that may arise.
Here are the five people/organizations I chose to follow on Twitter: @KevinPowell, @BKNation, @DiscoveryEd, @Marclamonthill, @KPEdConsultant
I had an amazing opportunity to hear Kevin Powell give a very inspiring speech at a Wayne State event. His drive and passion for social justice and education was astounding. I chose to follow him to continue to be inspired as well as to eventually have him back at Wayne to speak to my High School students.
I chose to follow BK Nation because its Kevin Powell's organization that helps create leaders. Since leadership is one of my objectives for my students. I am interested to follow this as a resource and reference but also as a potential collaboration.
I chose to follow DiscoveryEd because their goal is to connect teachers to each other. They also share great programming ideas that others are implementing.
I chose to follow Katherine Price (KPEdConsultant) because she was a former Admissions Counselor, Advisor, etc and she brings a wealth of knowledge about the college going process. I think her insight is extremely valuable.
I chose to follow Marc Hill because he's a college professor, writer, activist, etc who empowers young men in life and in the college going process. His wisdom will help me guide my population of young men in the right direction.
This semester I have utilized the various blogs, youtube channels and twitter accounts as resources. I am a resource provider and I help my students carve a path to their success. Since creating a PLN and adding these sites and/or people to my social media and RSS feeds, I have in fact been bombarded with more college planning information than in the past. I have taken things from these resources and helped students answer questions as well as parents. I have gravitated toward showing my students the Youtube videos that I have discovered about college prep. These videos are activities that the students have utilized to understand more about college. Something I'd like to do to improve my information gathering skills is definitely to be more organized such as the Diigo Bookmarking activity. This will help me filter through what types of information I am seeking. Overall, understanding the functionality of a PLN has become clearer. It's definitely an exercise that I want to continue so that I can build a huge resource library to better assist myself, my students and their parents.
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