Tuesday, January 8, 2013

The importance of a (my) PLN

While I spent some time home with pneumonia (yes, that was the exciting experience of my vacation) I had the opportunity of listening to a few webinars about twitter, PLN and social media.  I must say, I took some time to think about my PLN and how much I have learned from my colleagues, many of whom I have never met.

I am a school librarian, but I am also a teacher.  I spend a little time each day on twitter, pinterest and facebook.  Sometimes, I am chatting with friends, sometimes I do discussions, sometimes I just stalk people and keep an eye on what they talk about.  Regardless of my motives, I am happy to say I am always learning something.

My webinar talked a bit about PLN not just being on twitter, and with so many new forms of social media, the PLN is a different concept than it was even 3 years ago.  My PLN is on Pinterest and twitter mostly, but, I have spent some time scanning scoop.it and some RSS feeds I get daily. It doesn't take a lot of my time but the things I learn from people are unreal.  I have no one at my school who teaches the same content I do so using a PLN is logic, at best.

Why do I have a PLN?  Several reasons.  For starters, I am the only French teacher at my school and in the northeast corner of Indiana, only two schools still offer French.  Who can I learn from?  I need to collaborate with people who teach French and are having good experiences with it.  Secondly, I am the only certified librarian in my school.  I often have questions, need suggestions or have personal ideas to share.  I find posting something on twitter gets me instant results and often more outside of the box ideas.  Why not work with other people?

I have decided that my PLN is like a free professional development.  Post a topic, get instant results.  I have close to 7000 tweets on twitter.  Many of them are retweets of people who I follow.  Sometimes they post something smart and useful.  I find myself going back often.

If you have not started developing a PLN, you should. You will find people all over who know stuff you need help with.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments will not appear immediately. All content is monitored prior to submission.