TASK 8. "PLE"

 

PLE

Personal Learning Environment

-Potential Teachers-

What is a PLE?

According to Castañeda, L., and Adell, J. (2010), PLE (or also Personal Learning Environment) is the set of tools, information sources, connections and activities that each person uses regularly to learn. It is not just isolated applications and platforms, it is an approach to learning that makes the most of ICTs.

 We need to understand that a learning activity is something that emerges. 

The PLE could be said to have 3 main components:

1. Access & decode (multimedia information). Example: blogs, wikis, social networks, news, …

2. Recreating (doing/reflecting about information). Example: computer programs, audiovisual editing, wikis y blogs, ...

3.  Discuss (discussion and controversy with others). Any tool that helps you stay in contact with third parties. Ex.: social networks, video conferences, chats…

Steps to create a PLE:

- Identify and focus on the topic or topics you want to develop in your learning. Everything you want to learn, responding to your needs.

- Search for the tools, resources or sources of information necessary to carry out the learning process.

- Finally, create your own Personal Learning Network, where we get to know, share, and interact with those relevant to our learning.

It integrates the learner’s relationships with other people that constitute the learner’s social distributed cognition or the Personal Learning Network (PLN). Is a techno-social reality that embodies a socio-material entanglement (not just tools, but how do I use it).

Before starting the diagram and after this brief explanation, we wanted to see our differences in terms of each tool, so we talked about what each of us had answered in the Google forms and we had a great discussion and reflection about this topic.

With the information that each one of us gave, we saw what was the most repeated and so we reached an agreement that more or less fit the majority of us. Below is the agreement of each of the tools but then we will focus on the particularities of each one as each person has its own PLE and the main goal of the task was to understand that we use the same tools but everyone has its own context, preferences, time, devices, among other many aspects because it is something very deep and complex, is sot only our relation with the device. 

Use:

Aula virtual:

• Read/review content from others: Sometimes
• Texting: Seldom
• Write long texts: Seldom
• Send/create audios: Never
• Send/create pictures: Never
• Send/create videos: Sometimes
• Send/create urls and links: Sometimes

Blogger: 

• Read/review content from others: Sometimes
• Texting: Seldom
• Write long texts: Often
• Send/create audios: Never
• Send/create pictures: Never
• Send/create videos: Never
• Send/create urls and links: sometimes

PBworks: 

• Read/review content from others: Seldom
• Texting: Seldom
• Write long texts: Often
• Send/create audios: Never
• Send/create pictures: Sometimes
• Send/create videos: Never
• Send/create urls and links: Sometimes

ArcGIS Story Map:

• Read/review content from others: Seldom
• Texting: Seldom
• Write long texts: Seldom
• Send/create audios: Never
• Send/create pictures: Sometimes
• Send/create videos: Never
• Send/create urls and links: Seldom

Miro:

• Read/review content from others: Sometimes
• Texting: Seldom
• Write long texts: Seldom
• Send/create audios: Never
• Send/create pictures: Seldom
• Send/create videos: Never
• Send/create urls and links: Sometimes

DeepL:

• Read/review content from others: Never
• Texting: Never
• Write long texts: Often
• Send/create audios: Never
• Send/create pictures: Never
• Send/create videos: Never

Whatsapp:

• Read/review content from others: Often
• Texting: Often
• Write long texts: Sometimes
• Send/create audios: Often
• Send/create pictures: Often
• Send/create videos: Sometimes
• Send/create urls and links: Sometimes

Google Documents:

• Read/review content from others: Often
• Texting: Seldom
• Write long texts: Often
• Send/create audios: Never
• Send/create pictures: Sometimes
• Send/create videos:Never
• Send/create urls and links: Sometimes

Canva:

• Read/review content from others: Often
• Texting: Sometimes
• Write long texts: Seldom
• Send/create audios: Seldom
• Send/create pictures: Often
• Send/create videos: Sometimes
• Send/create urls and links: Sometimes

Device:

All the tools (Blogger,Miró, Canva, Aula Virtual, etc) can be accessed through a laptop, tablet or mobile phone, except Arc Gis story maps and PBworks (which are almost impossible to edit from a mobile phone). Even if the others can be used from all the three devices, each of us uses them from a different device for different reasons such as comfortability or simply preference. 

Sandra, Emilio and Eloy normally use the laptop for the vast majority of tools, Noelia and Lidia instead use the iPad for practically everything, since they don't have a laptop, and finally Sofia, except for some occasions, only uses her mobile phone, she finds it much more comfortable when writing and at her home she uses the laptop.

Access:

App: Canva, Google documents and DeepL.

Browser: Miró, blogger, PBworks and Storymap.

Both: WhatsApp and Aula virtual.

Place:

All the tools: All the tools have been used at home, in the classroom and at university.

Aula Virtual: Aula Virtual has been used on the street, for exceptional cases when we see an announcement and we are not at home or in class or to see the mark of an exam that has been corrected.

Sandra y Lidia: They use it also on the bus, because they spend many hours on the way to university and back and they enjoy working there for being productive.

Something that surprise us when discussing about the use, access and the space is that we realized that the individual use that each one of us gave to each app affected the group not in a positive or negative way but it’s necessary to adapt to the classmates, since each one of us give a different use to the application, this is something that thanks to our teacher in the class presentation we realized.