Blog Post #6

What is a PLN? A PLN stands for personal learning network, this network is the entire collection of people with whom you engage and exchange information online. People involved in your personal networks can be friends, family, peers, experts, and professors. Many teachers use personal learning networks to do many different things such as professional development and learning new technology to incorporate into their classrooms. PLN's use social networks like Twitter, Wiki, Facebook, blogs, and LinkedIn to communicate online. Along with professional development and learning new technologies, you can use PLN's to get lesson plans from master teachers and find links to interesting educational news. All of these things you can use in your classroom.

Very few people make it onto my list of PLN's, but that is only temporary. As my education furthers I would like to gain more personal learning networks than right now. I do have the honor of Dr. Strange being one of my personal learning networks. He has taught me so much in the few weeks I have been in his class. He has furthered my knowledge more than I could have expected. All of the teacher's blogs I have been required to comment on have become a part of my personal learning network too! Only reading just one of their blog's has given me information I can put to use in my classroom when I become a teacher. PLN's can really help me in many ways when I do become a teacher. I'd love to pass the information I have gained about PLN's to my students, in hopes that they can get a jump start on their personal learning networks. Therefore, the internet can become a great source for them to use.

PlN's can be formed piece by piece and in no hurry. Say you start with creating a Twitter account, and then you can build from there. Explore the Twitter world and then add another piece to you personal learning network, like Facebook. You can add something you have seen someone else has used or you can choose to try something new all on your own. The next step would be to fully branch out into the social networks to gain more people into your personal learning network. Since I am a lifelong learner, the tools I use now for my PLN will be updated by the time I am a teacher. So in the future I would love to use blogging as a way to connect with other educators on how their project based learning classrooms are going. PLN's are a great way to share what you have accomplished in your classroom and learn new information you may not have known!