My Personal Learning Network or PLN is important because it allows me to collaborate with other educators and continue learning about emerging theories in education. A PLN is a collection of social media networks in which you can connect with people who share similar interests and collaborate with one another about ideas, educational resources, and helpful on line links. It is therefore very important as a classroom teacher to establish a PLN as it connects you to others around the world and allows you to stay up to date with emerging technological advances and educational practices.
Twitter is a great addition to a professional PLN. While it is often looked at negatively due to its social and gossip aspects, many people fail to realize the networks endless educational possibilities. There are many people, my self included, who use twitter strictly as an educational and collaborative tool. On my Twitter account I currently have just over ten followings who are all classmates, future teachers, or current educators. By following such people, we will be able to view each other tweets, and collaborate on our shared interest of education. On twitter I also participated in an online chat sessions, in which educators around the world all meet to communicate about a specific topic over the period of one hour. I participated in the #edchat discussion on Tuesday April 5th from nine to ten am. The topic of the chat was, "Social Media is a professional tool for successful exchange of information and collaboration. How do we involve more educators". This topic was strangely relevant to my participation in the chat, as it directly addressed the importance of establishing a PLN. During the chat, I was more of an observer then anything else, as I was a little overwhelmed by the vast participation, and fast pace of the tweets. I could barely keep up, reading all the tweets but did read some very inspirational ideas about how to show others that social media can be a great educational tool.
Diigo, is another great tool for educators, as it saves you the step of searching for creditable and useful on line material and resources. Diigo is a social bookmarking tool that allows you to bookmark sites and tag them with helpful key words. Through such keywords you are able to find other sites regarding the information that other educators have already tagged as valuable. In my Diigo account, I picked my followings by first looking for others with the ed422 tag. I then explored others followings to find people who had bios that sounded like they would be a positive person to follow and learn from their bookmarked pages. I found my bookmarked PLN pages by searching PLN tags and choosing ones I thought connected to this class and my future. The first site was titled "How to use Twitter to grow Your PLN" and was an article about twitter by Edutopia. This site listed many different educational hash tags and chats, and was a very positive site for PLN building. The second site was titled, "Personal Learning Networks are Virtual Lockers for Schoolkids" and was also an article by Edutopia. The final site I tagged PLN was a google site titled "building a PLN". This was a very useful resources with links, videos and descriptions regarding PLN building.
Finally, I became a member of classroom 2.0. This is a social media site for classroom educators who are interested in web 2.0 where they can read articles, watch videos, participate in chats and blogs and collaborate with others. Like other social networking sites, this allows you to create your own blog and follows others, except unlike twitter, it is limited to educators, which eliminated the gossip aspect. On this site I explored the elementary school 2.0 blog, which was designed to discuss the specific challenges of social media at the elementary level. On this blog people placed links to their own blogs and shared their experiences with incorporating technology in the classroom.
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