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Howard Rheingold gives 8 excellent tips about growing a personal learning network. Explore, search, follow, tune, feed, engage, enquire and respond.

Howard Rheingold (hope some of you know who he is and follow him on Twitter) writes this useful post on how to get the most out of your PLN. The key is to be active and share.

This is a great resource. I think the information is important to remember and the tips seem simple and effective. I also started following him on Twitter because of your recommendation.

Not only does this resource provide a solid description of what a PLN is, it also answers the important "why do I need one" question. It was particularly helpful to get an idea of how social media is essential to a strong PLN.

A great article that offers many valid and important reasons that an instructor should join PLNs.

This article supports why we all need to join PLN! Great read!

SocialMedia Students is a great project that was created to be a resources for parents, educators, and students. You can also read their Blog, join their Facebook page, or follow them on Twitter.

This student blog is an excellent example of active learning and sharing that learning with others. The author shares what she is learning, her reflections, and leaves a positive digital footprint that will really benefit her. Comments are enabled and she posts commenting guidelines to ensure good netiquette is followed.

SocialMedia Students is a great project that was created to be a resources for parents, educators, and students. This project is to help them to have a solid foundation of understanding social media. You can also read their Blog, join their Facebook page, or follow them on Twitter.

Great use of Twitter in a 3rd grade classroom. Students tweet concise summaries, but the class also follows discovery education on Twitter to stream videos that DE links to in it's Twitter posts. I love Twitter as both a discussion/summary forum and a resource for materials.

This presentation doesn't follow a specific project, but it has some great ideas for using Twitter in the classroom. I particularly like Twitter book club, and Twitter as a backchannel.

This high school uses Twitter to tweet updates, links, resources, and announcements to students about the library media center. With over 600 followers, this is an excellent example of using social media can reach and inform students.

Simple steps to follow when teaching ELL students

An excellent resource from scholastic for the Thanksgiving holiday. With teacher registration, you are granted access to the following: *Video tours of Wampanoag dwellings, canoe construction, and daily life *Replay of webcast including interviews with interpreters from the Plimoth Plantation *Series of classroom emails from a Pilgrim girl and a Wampanoag boy *Reminder emails for virtual field trips and webcast replay Interested in integrating technology into holiday lessons? This is an excellent place to start for Thanksgiving!

This is one article in a series geared toward teacher librarians. This article is short and deals with both the "why" and "hows" to PLEs. (Although the term Personal Learning Environment is used instead of PLN, I felt it could still be helpful.) The article sets up the need for PLEs by recognizing the vast amount of information available to us today. It follows by breaking down Personal, Learning, and Environment in a concise form. The second half of the article focuses on the "hows." I have included the reference only because I had some difficulty retrieving some of my previously bookmarked pages from Ebscohost. "Personal Learning Environments in the Learning Commons. By: LOERTSCHER, DAVID V., KOECHLIN, CAROL, Teacher Librarian, 14811782, Dec2011, Vol. 39, Issue 2"

This article takes the provocative position that a PLN is *not* the best learning situation for all learners. The authors qualify this, however, explaining "when the technology used to support learning is designed to support a specific learning model, this can often lead to a compulsory learning process that users must follow to reach the course objectives." I am not entirely sure this is a bad thing, however; in formal learning situations, I think it makes sense to have clear objectives, assessments, and learning activities. In informal settings--such as personalized professional development for practicing educators, for example--this point might hold true. The authors explain that individuals' epistemological beliefs affect their willingness to learn in an informal (PLN-based) learning situation. Further, the authors believe that beliefs about the role of technology for learning will impact the learning that can occur in a PLN. I really agree with these ideas!

This is a pretty simple explanation of connectivism. Basically it is about adding nodes to your PLN which connects you to another resource.

Usually when I see anything WIki that has to do with research I have the initial tendency to try to stay far away because in my undergrad years I was constantly reminded to pursue peer reviewed articles. What I really appreciate about this resource is how simple and basic it is on Connectivism. This wikispace provides all the "nuts and bolts" of Connectivism and is a great starting point for digging deeper into understanding its theory. Great find!

"Connectivism is a learning theory promoted by Stephen Downes and George Siemens." Learning occurs with connections in networks. This article believes that with connectivism we can move to a new age of learning. Learning can be more collaborative and global. With connectivism we see the use of networks with nodes and connections to elaborate on our learning.

This study explores the pitfalls of virtual teams within the business world. While I realize this paper doesn't focus on schools specifically it still applies in its exploration of communities of practice. This paper follows a few case studies while it explores virtual teams rather than teams working in the same space or building. Traditionally, virtual teams, have more challenges and communities of practice are introduced as a way to help overcome these challenges. Communities of practice are also defined and stages of participation are explored.

The study in the paper was interesting as it looked at K-12 educators and their use of Twitter to research, relate and form PLNs. Twitter and other social medias have allowed teachers to form networks that are specific to their needs and wants in terms of their own professional growth. In the "End of Isolation" the researchers findings touched on the fact that "over 82% of the time, the educators in this study chose to follow other educators or content experts related to their field of teaching so they were able to create a personal learning network meaningful to their professional needs." Now I just need to work with teachers at my school site to help them realize the individualized professional potential!

This study underscored the benefits of Twitter for the educational community. The article shared the advantages to new teachers in particular, where one participant stated it changed her vision and practice in the classroom. Very powerful!

Of all the resources I have read thus far on PLNs, this particular article forced me to think deeper and reconsider my interpretation of this concept. First of all, I found that the article provided a picture of the quality of interaction that can occur within Twitter. The data collected by researchers provides an in depth look at Twitter as a PLN - a feat that few other resources I have read have accomplished. By detailing the amount, quality, and type of interactions and connections, a tangible conception of a PLN emerges, even for someone who has little to no experience with Twitter. Of the 10 surveyed, a majority of their connections and tweets were professionally related. According to Nussbaum-Beach (video I posted), the difference between a PLN and a CoP is the familiarity of the people and the connection to an idea or problem. However, this study provides a different perception of a PLN that is largely professionally based with strong two-way connections. These conclusions made me wonder if it is possible for facets of a PLN on Twitter to transform into a CoP. Further, at what point can one argue that a PLN has successfully transform into a virtual CoP? Thanks for sharing. This was an excellent read!

This link provides 10 tips for using PLNs and 10 tips for establishing productive ones. Using Diigo is the first tip for establishing a productive PLN - I thought that was pretty cool.

"Sharing discoveries is more efficient and honorable than patenting them" - I love that! The steps outlined in this post definitely are based on this great principle. It's also great to know that that's exactly what we do at Edtech (unlike in so many other grad programs where so much of the student work never gets shared.) Great post!

I like lists and how-tos. This article by Miriam Clifford provides a great introduction to the nuts and bolts of establishing a PLN.