INTRO: The Importance of Sharing and Communicating in Professional Learning Networks
Learning no longer requires proximity. In today's educational settings, learning more often takes place across vast distances with the help of connectivity.
Connecting with educators from outside the walls of our own classrooms, hallways, and districts, helps us to better evaluate the validity of our instructional practices and procedures. Learning by sharing is the best way to develop deep and lasting knowledge and skills. Becoming a member of a Distributed and Connected Professional Learning Community, also known as Personal Learning Network (PLN), empowers each learner to not only develop new understanding and practices, but to become a vital partner in how the entire learning community develops. Participation of each practitioner builds a better understanding and world-view. Participation in a PLN builds the necessary expertise for planning and meeting future local and global challenges.
Too often we have a skewed since of well-being when we compare ourselves to peers in a local settings. A more realistic evaluation of our current instructional methods and procedures would be to collaborate and share ideas with eclectic partners across vast distances and myriads of global learning environments. When we state that "learning no longer requires proximity", we mean that attendance within 4 walls is not necessary for learning to take place. Learning to connect to valuable online resources, experts and professionals affords more engaging, challenging, and refreshing perspectives. Learning to vet the vast amounts of information, applications, and communications, is a major skill today. Learning in a PLN requires learning and sharing with all types of collaborators. You might envision a PLN as a hub (node) in a spoked wheel with information flowing to and from all types of other "nodes" in other wheels (networks).
We learn best if we teach. Mentoring allows all participants to better grasp and demonstrate new knowledge and skills. We want to give you the opportunity and ability to build a Professional Mentoring Plan and to implement the plan with selected peers while gaining 40 CEU credits (8 per unit). Upon completion of the Course, you will also be invited to participate in Workshops and the TCEA Conference each year while gaining a budget for purchasing items for your instructional environment.
If you take the challenge begin here:
Unit 1 Definitions
Unit 2 Building Online Skills
Blended Learning
Integrated Curriculum
Project-based Engagement
STEM
Unit 3 Building a Website
Unit 4 Digital Citizenship
RESOURCES: