I have already shared with colleagues how powerful a P.L.N can be but it is always worth saying again. On Thursday (10/01/13) I worked with some colleagues to explore ideas focused on incorporating I.C.T more into their work. Instead of just relying on our own experience and thoughts though when approaching the meeting, I first asked my P.L.N (not sure what a P.L.N is keep reading below the pictures), please see below for the response I had.
My initial question on Twitter:
Snapshot 1:
Snapshot 2:
Snapshot 3:
But what is a P.L.N?
Post taken from: h
ttp://www.teachingvillage.org/2012/01/03/what-is-a-pln-anyway/
PLN is an acronym for
Personal
Learning
Network.
The acronym is relatively new, but the idea is not. Teachers have
always had learning networks—people we learn from and share with.
Teachers are information junkies. We’re also social. Put the two
together and you have a personal learning network.
The structure of my PLN has changed since I first started teaching.
The pre-Internet 80s
Yes, there was an internet of sorts in the 80s, but I wasn’t on
it. Teachers at my school made up the core of my PLN. Network central
was wherever we gathered between and after classes. Most of the
information we shared came from articles or books we’d read, conferences
or workshops we attended. Books came from the bookstore, information
from conferences came home in suitcases. The good stuff was photocopied
and filed for future reference.
My PLN was very small—the teachers in my school, a few colleagues
from graduate school, workshop presenters. Most information was shared
face to face.
The e-mail 90s
I sent my first e-mail message in 1995. I could find information
about books online, but had to buy them in a store (or, ask someone in
the US to buy them in a store and ship them to me). I saved bookmarks
for websites I liked, but still printed out pages for my files, and
still shared information face to face.
My PLN got a little bigger in the 90s. I could use the Internet to
look for infomation, and I could use e-mail to communicate with people
after I met them at conferences. However, the people in my PLN were
still mostly teachers I had met face to face.
The social 2000s
For information junkies, this decade has been amazing. Not only can I
order books online and have them shipped to me in Japan, I can order
books and download them to my computer. I access most journals and
newspapers the same way. Information is waiting for me each morning in
my inbox from discussion groups. The sheer volume of information
available can be overwhelming at times.
The biggest change has been in the way I meet and communicate with people in my PLN.
First, there is
Twitter,
which is like a big noisy teacher’s lounge. Everyone is talking
(texting) at once. I might share a conversation with one or two teachers
in the lounge, and catch fragments of other conversations around me. As
I read the newspapers and group digests in my inbox, I share the good
bits by sending short messages to other teachers on Twitter. Since they
do the same, there are a lot of good bits being shared.
Most of the resources are in the form of links—to websites, to
e-books, to blogs, or to activities. Rather than printing out copies for
my files, I save the links on a social bookmarking site, like
Delicious.
Because I use tags instead of file folders, I can easily search for
specific items. And because teachers can look through each other’s
bookmarks, it’s easy to share.
Discussion groups (like JALT’s
Teaching Children SIG or IATEFL’s
Young Learners and Teenagers SIG) are like conference breakout sessions, where teachers have extended, and topic-oriented conversations.
Nings are like subject area resource rooms in a large school. They’re
social networks connecting teachers with common interests. In addition
to discussion forums, members keep blogs, share resources, and plan
group activities. EFL teachers might belong to
EFL Classroom 2.0 or
English Companion, or both.
I attended more conferences than ever before, but travel much less. I
still prefer to physically attend a conference, but online sessions and
summaries allow me to be there in spirit even when it’s impossible to
be there in body. For example, the
IATEFL conference
this year broadcast plenary and workshop sessions (and then archived
the videos available on the website), Twitter allowed workshop
participants to share updates and allowed teachers not at the conference
(like me) to ask questions during panel discussions. Issues raised
during the presentations were discussed in online forums.
The kinds of discussions I have, and information I share with my PLN
hasn’t changed all that much over the years–what works in class, how
students learn, how to become a better teacher. How I meet other
teachers, where we discuss ideas, and how we share information
has
changed. Significantly. My PLN now includes teachers who live quite far
from me—in Asia, Australia, the Americas, Europe and Africa. I meet
them online. I learn from them online. I share with them online.
The teachers in my Personal Learning Network are some of the best friends I’ll never meet.
