can happen anywhere at anytime from anyone and anything. Your
connections and any information you use are learning experiences that
can help you grow personally and professionally.
Personal Learning Network (PLN)
is nothing new about PLNs. They are the people and information sources
that help you meet your learning goals. Building your PLN means that
you not only seek to learn from others but you also help others in the
network learn. Anyone can make a contribution. Your
PLN can be your most powerful learning tool no matter what the subject.
My PLN used to be the people I met face-to-face: the people I worked
with, classes I took or taught, friends and family, organizations I
joined and the information was what I googled on the Internet, in
books, textbooks, or periodicals at the library. Remember how long it
used to take to find what you were looking for? David Warlickwrote about the gardener's approach to learning that helped me understand how to grow my PLN as my information ecosystem.
my PLN connects me to others and to information in ways I never thought
possible a few years ago. I still use Google to search for information
but now I can find trends, maps, and even literature reviews. Social
networks connect me to friends, work contacts, and friends of friends.
I can see what they are doing in Twitter, updates on their
conversations and links to new information. Facebook not only updates
the status of each of my connections, I can join groups set up by
friends and learn from wall posts. Here’s a diagram of some of my PLN:
So how can your PLN help you build your Professional Learning Community (PLC)?
PLN can help you meet your personal and/or professional learning goals.
A PLC is where you focus on student learning. Your PLC focuses on a
specific problem area of the students in your school. Richard DuFour
shares three critical questions that drive the work of the PLC:
What do we want each student to learn?
How will we know when each student has learned it?
How will we respond when a student experiences difficulty in learning?
know a teacher can make a difference to the children in their
classroom. However, a school may find many of the children in the
entire school are falling through the cracks. The teachers in the
school as a PLC can collaborate to improve or restructure how they
reach at-risk students. They can analyze student data reviewing
patterns and trends. Each teacher can use their PLN to research
background information about specific issues brought to light from the
data analysis, to ask questions of others in similar situations, to
connect with other classrooms for global collaborations, and to share
the findings from their PLC.
The PLC becomes a Community of Practice (CoP)
CoP is where you take what you learned in the PLC and transfer it to
practice where teachers can work together to do action research and/or
lesson study. The teacher can ask “What does it take for me to change my practice to include this new learning?”
This is deep, thoughtful work involving modeling new methodologies,
observations from another teacher or coach, reflections on the results
and process by asking what worked, what didn’t work.
PLN connects you to other professionals and to the information that
will help you with your work in your PLC and CoP. Not only will the PLN
help you, you can use your PLN to share best practices, blog
reflections, and post examples of student work..