My PLE

My initial PLE

The first time I heard about "Personal Learning Environment" was when I was introduced to this course. At the very beginning, I thought it was an interesting idea because creating it would help me to find all the websites I usually visit and surf on in an easy and quickly way, all in the same place just clicking on them! I would go so far as to say that I am not fond of technologies, but I know that it is a great tool to use and implement in my class. Throughout this course, I expect to improve my digital competence. When it comes to creating my PLE in Symbaloo, I have added all the websites I frequently browse related to my academic studies. I have also organised my PLE by grouping the websites depending on the topic they address: university, dictionaries, cloud services, music degree and emails. Those are the websites I navigate on daily so far and I use to accomplish my tasks and aims.

 

My final PLE

By the end of the semester, my PLE has changed completely. At the very beginning, I thought I was not going to use it very often because I was not used to it, but I was wrong. Every single time I discovered an interesting tool that helped me move forward my learning, I set it on my PLE in Symbaloo. In that way, when I needed to find a website I considered interesting, it was easier to me to find it. Besides, I did not have enough space to set them in my browser preferences so Symbaloo let me to have all of them in the same space and access to them just with one click.


As I have mentioned before, my PLE has lots of tools I found out interesting throughout this course and that I can implement in my teaching so as to make it more dynamic, interactive and significant to my students.

Nowadays, my PLE is organized in this way:

• At the top-left corner, I gathered all the websites related to my university studies such as those that I use to work with my classmates: Google Drive or Dropbox.

• At the top-centre corner, there are tools that I use for my music studies.

• At the top-right corner, we can find the two electronic mails I always use for my personal staff.

• At the bottom-right corner, I grouped together the websites and tools I can carry out in my teaching. I selected the ones I have considered more interesting in this course. For example, in the first row, we can find the websites I can use to create and edit videos I found more attractive.

To put it into a nutshell, I would go so far as to say that Symbaloo is a good option to gather all the websites we use daily in an easy way.