Building a PLN for Education
Posted by Denis Soukhanov on Fri, Jul 09, 2010
One of the most important things a teacher can do this summer is to build a PLN or Personal Learning Network. Your Personal Learning Network is a network of people that you connect with online for social and professional reasons. The top sites that I use for my PLN are Twitter, Delicious, Facebook, and Blogger. These sites allow me to connect with co-workers, family, friends, and former students, along with educators from around the world, educator-friendly companies, educators I met in college, professors, and other experts in the field. By using these different resources to connect with different people, I am able to find classroom resources, lesson plans, backchannels from conferences, along with new ideas to implement in my classroom.
Twitter
Twitter is a microblogging website. On Twitter you can follow the feeds (short statements) of people that you add. To build a PLN on special needs education, you can search the term “special needs education” to see what people are tweeting about on the subject. If you find someone that seems to be knowledgeable in the field and provides information or insight that you like, then you can follow that person. One feed to start to follow for education would be @MangoMon, Learning Today’s special needs education feed. You can also add my twitter account as a feed to follow educational technology including special needs education technology @TechSavvyLaura.
Wikis & Twitter
Another great resource for building a PLN is wikis. These are editable websites. One wiki site that I found following the Twitter feed at #ISTE10, from the ISTE Conference last week, was a wiki that has a list of teacher twitter users organized by their area of focus in education. For special education teachers, there are several different areas to search under including special education teachers, elementary teachers, and homebound teachers. Next to each teacher’s name is their Twitter screenname, a short synopsis of the person, what they do, and where they are located. This is a great way to build your special education PLN.
Delicious
Delicious is a social bookmarking site. It is very similar to bookmarks/favorites that you can access in your browser, however Delicious makes your bookmarks available online. Bookmarks can be tagged (have keywords added to them), so that you can search for similar sites within all of your bookmarks. Your bookmarks can be shared with other people. As a teacher you can create a Delicious account to keep websites easily accessible to integrate within your lessons. You can also search through other users links, including fellow teachers. Lab teachers could use a Delicious account as the homepage for the browser. They can then populate the account with the sites the students need to use in class. This way, it is easier for students to access the required sites for class lessons. Students can use Delicious as a way to save frequently visited sites. Students can use it to keep track of sources they are using for a research project.
Blogger
(and various other blogs)
I’ve actually written about blogging in several of my previous posts, but from the vantage point of student blogging. Blogger is one online resource for blogging. Blogging is creating an online journal. Many teachers maintain blogs for their classrooms or about educational topics. Through blogger for your PLN, you can create your own blog to reflect upon your teaching practices or share ideas with other teachers around the world. You can also search for other teachers, professors, educational professionals, and companies to follow their blogs. This can be done by subscribing to their updates and then receiving them in your email. This makes it much easier to follow rather than having to remember to go back to their sites weekly.
Including following MangoMon’s blog posts, here are some good blogs to follow for special education teachers:
- Jerry’s Special Education Blog on About.com
- Education Week’s Special Education Blog
- List of Top 50 Special Education Blogs
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking site. This site is mainly used for personal information that helps keep in touch with friends and family. It would not be a traditional tool that a teacher would think they could use for building a PLN, but many teachers have friends who are teachers that they may have connected with through school or work. I am surprised at the amount of educational connections that I was able to build on Facebook. Many of my teacher friends post links to articles, resources, or photographs of their classrooms. We are all able to reflect on our experiences along with sharing ideas and resources.
There are many more resources for building a PLN. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to comment and share your PLN resources below!
- Article by Laura Ketcham
Free Teacher Resources | Special Education by MangoMon