Open Monologue
Just because I'm making it up as I go along doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing

I’m a big supporter of the personalized learning network/environment as a toolset for self directed learning. I have found mine immensely helpful in my professional and personal learning. I like the diagram that Scott Leslie has put together to describe his (and mine) PLE.

Scott Leslie's Personalized Learning Environment diagram

I’d like to help my students develop the same sort of toolset for themselves. As a teacher, I want to be able to help my students grow their PLE in age/grade appropriate ways. Maybe we should even explicitly put that as a learning objective in the K12 curriculum. What I need as a teacher is a way to monitor and/or participate in an appropriate way. I’d like to be able to watch as students grow their PLE and make my presence explicit when I need to.

But I don’t want to look through a dozen different sites to do this. I’m not sure if a straightforward RSS aggregator would do the trick, but I want a similar kind of tool. A PLE aggregator if you will. I’ve decided to call it my Student Learning Dashboard (SLD) and I see it as the flip side of a PLE. It would be a way for me to monitor students as they create and use their PLE, a way for me to participate as I see fit, a way to see how their PLE’s are connecting together, and a way for me to communicate with students, individually or as a group. One of the features I like in Scott’s diagram and explanation for a PLE is the two way communication and I see my SLD as being my tool to not only monitor but to communicate.

OK – this has been a quick brain dump/wish list before I leave the school so it might not make a lot of sense, but I’m wondering if such a tool/toolset exists? If not, how do I/you/we create it?