Blog Post #5 Part #1

PLNs What Are They?


Reading Developing A Personal Learning Network in EDM 310 was very insightful to me for this post. So what are PLNs? PLN stands for Personal Learning Networks. PLNs are learning networks of people whom you interact with about ideas and thoughts related to your professional interest(s). PLNs can help build relationships with other educators around the world. You can share your knowledge about the things happening throughout your classroom and within your life and vice versa. You can share and bounce ideas off each other, and also see how other educators use tools and technology in their classrooms the same or differently. PLNs can be formed by searching throughout social media outlets or tools and then sharing those things you learned. For example, you can use Twitter to form a PLN. On twitter, you can ask questions or tweet certain things about a topic that interests you. You can also follow people that relate to the topic as well as search hashtags related to the topic. I most likely would start with Twitter when I create my own PLN since I'm very active on the site. The first addition to my PLN would be educators as right now I follow a few professors from the University of South Alabama, particularly Ms. Paige Vitulli. She tweets many thing pertaining to education and art of course, but she also tweets to many different people around the world. I've seen her interact with George Rodrigue, the creator of the Blue Dog series, many of times. She's tweeted artwork from her class of them creating their own "blue dog", and George Rodrigue has re-tweeted her. She seems to have a well established personal learning network.

After finishing up reading about PLNs, I decided to check out the sites Symbaloo and Netvibes since they are good ways to start creating a personal learning network. I chose to sign up for Symbaloo, You can easily access your bookmarks and internet favorites on this site. It even teaches you the basics of the site. I like the layout and how everything is spread out in front of me, and I don't have to go different places for things.