Personal learning network (or PLN)
is a network of colleagues that learn from one another. We have all heard the phrase
“why reinvent the wheel” when you can take and use others discovery’s to build
upon your own visions and ideas to improve your own pedagogy. In other words if
there is a technique or tool a teacher is using to improve student learning,
why not learn and use it in your own pedagogy. A personal learning network (or
PLN) is a
place for educators to create networks to grow and contribute to their
own professional development.
The 21st
century learner and educator have an array of web 2.0 tools to utilize while networking.
Such as Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook and many more. A great example is
using blogger in this class to collaborate and share findings and ideas to
improve our integration of digital tools into our school community’s. It is essential
that as educators we continue to improve our own pedagogy and a perfect place
to speed this process up is on the World Wide Web. Personal learning networks
are a convenient and beneficial place to continue to build our professional
development.
I liked that you talked about teachers keeping up with pedagogy and how the Web helps to make improvement happen quickly. The world today functions at a much faster pace than it used to and it's important to stay up to speed, especially as educators, so that we can improve in our own practices and make sure that everyone around us is improving as well. I also helps that a PLN is free and extremely convenient to access almost anywhere. I also think that Blogger is a valuable tool and has been beneficial to use for our classes. Great post!
ReplyDeleteWith everything that we as educators need to do, time is definitely a valuable commodity. We can definitely save ourselves time by using PLNs to share resources and learn from each other.
ReplyDeleteWith all of the benefits of social networking, I concerns me that many districts place blanket server restrictions on services like twitter. I realize that internet safety is important but PLNs are for any learner and teaching our kids to build and responsible curate the social networks that they are creating for themselves outside of school.
ReplyDeleteI'm with you and I believe districts will open more networks as time goes on. My district alone is putting a lot of the network controls in the teachers hands. Granted we can't keep track of them out of school but what is done in school needs to be guided instruction with intent to learn.
ReplyDeleteA great way to describe the goal of a personal learning network is to NOT reinvent the wheel. Schools and districts invest a lot of money for teachers to enhance their knowledge and teaching through the use of courses or paid professional development. Having teachers create PLN within their own districts allows teachers to learn, and share the information that they are learning with their peers. This can allow teachers to gather the most beneficial resources, and share the tools that they think will apply best to their classroom or PLN goal.
ReplyDelete