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This pages provides ten links that are basically guides for creating effective PLNs. I was going to post them individually, but thought it was more effective to post them here together. As I browsed them - I saw some pretty cool ideas.

I truly enjoyed reading this page. The guides were short but very helpful. The comment about being a beacon of light was spot on. How often do people take, giving nothing back in return. The whole foundation of a personal learning network is to give and receive. Being an active member also means to help out those who are new to the community. There have been many times when I have struggled with a new concept or application and I know someone in one of my classes knew how to help but chose not to. This is a huge strength of a PLN, helping one another and sharing information. I think introducing elementary students to the concept of a PLN would be useful not only now but in their futures. Learning how to network is a 21st century skill that everyone must know how to engage in.

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 is a one-page graphic that describes the nuts and bolts to the connectivism theory. Produced by Western Education, it concludes that this theory was successful in a controlled study in which each student chose 10 modules to study from a longer list. With the use of a group to share ideas, each student became a vital cog in the experience, not just bystanders.

Great concept map! I really like that everything is included on one page and in a format that is easy to understand and follow.

I wish I had stumbled onto this concept map a few courses ago! I like how it summarizes how connectivism flows through the cycle of a course into easy to digest chunks of information.

This is a site that I have been using to share resources with my students.  This site was created for students at my school the year before I was hired.  The teacher I replaced has become our educational technology specialist and we work closely to find resources to use in the social studies classroom.  We are in the process of creating a new site, but for the time being my students and I still access this page often.  

A quick read, highlighting the major concepts of connectivism.

Great reference site. Could probably be used as a primer when getting into connectivism for the first time - use it as a cheat-sheet when reading an article with more density.

Simply put this is the connectivism home page. It goes into descriptive measures of such a concept and talks about what learning is.

In this article, Whitby describes the rationale behind personal learning networks and how they may help educators deal with modern challenges. He also argues that PLNs have potential in future educational reform.

This is a nice brief article for the "what" and "why" of PLNs. As I mentioned in a previous post, it's nice to see concise articles that give a good ground work for a topic. It beats getting bogged down in pages upon pages. Thanks for the resource!

The resource linked here is a page to the first lesson of a MOOC on connectivism and connective knowledge. This page features several resources on connectivism, many f which are from Siemens and Downes themselves.

I've seen Leslie present at several conferences. Her resources are excellent and list many different types of Web 2.0 tools. Look down at the bottom of this page for "Tools You Can Use Tomorrow."

Click on each building to learn more about places in the community: Post Office, Fire Station, Police Station, Hospital, School, Library. For each, there is a linked page with a cartoon image (Ben Franklin dressed up as each worker), a description, and some include a link for more information.

Community safety section includes links to a variety of pages: Getting Around, Hanging Out in the Neighborhood, Helping Out in the Community, Riding Right, and Safe Shopping.

This page has a wide variety of ways to integrate technology into classrooms from the elementary to high school levels.

A guide from UC Berkeley - Teaching Library Internet Workshops on how to skillfully evaluate web pages

set up class webpages...let students create their own pages

Create a free page with thumbnails of websites that students can use to navigate to selected sites.

Thanks for posting this site. It looks great! I have been doing this myself through Wikispaces but it was very time consuming to get a thumbnail shot of each site, upload it to the wiki, and organize everything.

The CLA supports educators, youth organizations and others to create meaningful social, interest driven, civic and participatory learning opportunities for youth. Watch the videos on the "Why Connected Learning" page of the website.

Great videos on connected learning. How do I get my school to that place? Very true, traditional learning used to take place within the confines of a school, but now we have so much more we can offer students. I passed it along to my admin, he has this line of thinking, but we need to encourage follow through.

Summary: This is a site that provides a community of practice startup kit. This site walks through with detail the process of starting a community of practice. The visuals are great, and there is a ton of valuable resources provided. The page is a bit old, "2000" but much of the information is still pertinent today.

Todd - What an AWESOME find. I am just not sure just how current all the information is. Many times the article references the "Winding Down" of CoPs, mainly because this seems to be more of a corporate-type CoP model. As educators come and go from a CoP, I am not convinced it would wind down. Also, this article references the value of the telephone and Convergence since 2000 has increased the values of Podcasts, SKYPE, Google Hangouts, blogs, glogs, Facebook, Twitter, and online chat as nearly replacing the phone. The guidelines posted in the article have a great deal of value. The Venn diagram on page 9 and the indicators of a successful CoP on pp. 9-10 resonated with me. I will be interested to see how they mesh with our coursework.

Looking at application of design principles by Clark and Mayer. Could be applied to any multimedia creation including slide presentations.

This project also has students making a Facebook account for their character and using these accounts to communicate with other students. This is similar to the remixing assignment, but it is a long-term assignment rather than a culminating activity. Students start by making a Facebook page for their character and post status updates as the class reads the book. They talk from the perspective of their character and it allows students to expand their thinking. When students are done, they use their page to have discussions about the novel as a class and out of character. This is a great way for students to step into the chose of different characters they are reading about and has students participate in multi-level writing. This is applicable to numerous different reading projects and something I could see myself using in my English class.

This is a great project where students get to demonstrate what they know about Quadrilaterals. For this assignment, students selected a quadrilateral to make an Instagram account for. They are to create an account that contained correct information about the shape and use an appropriate username. They also had to include at least 5 pictures of their shape. All of the posts used the class hashtag so they could easily be sorted on Instagram. When people finished their account page they had to go to other pages and check their peers quality of work. Questions, comments, and concerns were addressed by the students in the form of comments and likes. This particular example made use of a lot of poster paper and physical models. It would be easy to go all digital with this project and have students take or find pictures of their shape in the real world. This gives students another way to express what they know and interact with their peers.