Blog Post 5

Photo by: Learning More About ICT


What are Personal Learning Networks?

I've learned through this assignment that a PLN is a Personal Learning Network that consists of many different contacts and tools to help assist you in anyway they can. These contacts don't just appear overnight, it takes time to build up a good base of people and tools. These contacts are for you to use to collaborate and consult with those people for whatever you need help with. The tools on your PLN are collected as you grow your network based on the many sites you use.
Personal Learning Networks can most definitely help me as a teacher. If I need to collaborate with another educator, I will have contacts from my PLN to use to do that. According to The Fischbowl: Mt Personal Learning Network in Action article, Karl Fisch explains how it is so important for our students to learn how to collaborate with others and to do assignments on the web so they can experience having a wider audience. I think that when I'm a teacher, helping my students create a PLN will benefit them, so in turn I will have to have my own PLN and be very familiar with how my own network is built.
PNL's are formed throughout your educational career. To start forming your PLN, create an account in which to organize all of your information. For me, I made an account with Symbaloo that collects all of my tools and contacts into one place on the web. This account is alway available to me wherever I go as long as I have internet. This website is a great way to helping first time PLN creators keep track of what all connections they have and also to keep all of your sources in one place. Your PLN continues to grow throughout your years in education and it could possibly never stop growing.
As far as my first additions to my PLN, I think that would be the EDM 310 staff. I feel like those contacts will be more than happy to collaborate on certain ideas or be available for any help they can provide if I ask. I also think that adding contacts from where I have commented on teachers blogs would be beneficial to me throughout my career. I think that having a diverse group of contacts will provide me with many people I can work with.
Also, aside from contacts for my PLN I would add the major websites that I visit daily. Some of which include: Blogger, Twitter, YouTube, Gmail, Skype, Google, Delicious, Moodle, and more. I think it is important to research all of the source websites that Symbaloo has to offer to help grow my network in my years to come as not only a student but as an educator.