Blog 6- The networked student

Wendy Drexler explains to us how our role as future teachers are broadening. We will be teaching what will be considered “networked students”. A networked student refers to students that are connected through a variety of social networks and professional sources and can educate him or herself through these connections. The biggest challenge according to Ms. Drexler will be teaching these students and ourselves how to properly manage the information we see.

Our role in this will be helping the students learn how to navigate through all of the bad information and organize the quality information they have found using networks. The video uses the term “connectivism” which is a theory that students/people learn from the social networks and connections they make through those networks.

The idea of “connectivism” and “networked students” are both excited and a little scary for me to think about. I look forward to being able to teach my students how to access, manage, and learn from all the useful information that is out there on the web. It is scary however because I still have some problems with organization sometimes.


Getting to create new things and learn new things is always exciting. Getting to do it on a computer makes it that much more exciting. Students today have many more ways to gaining knowledge. When I was a student we were simply told to do the work now as long as the work gets completed it doesn't matter how it gets done, students have a chance to do it "their" way and to used their creative personalities to get the work done.
I understand the cutting back of paper in the classroom and this is a wonderful way of doing that. Creating a PLN you don't need pencil and you don't need paper. Students are able to find all the information the need out on the web and place it on their personal page. However with the huge amount of information out there we must remind the students to stay focused and not get sidetracked.

My PLN still needs much work but I am working slowly on expanding it. For the most part I use bookmarks and keep myself organized with the categories within bookmarks. I am attempting to add these bookmarked cites to symbaloo.