What is a Personal Learning Network (PLN)?

A personal learning network (PLN) is a group of colleagues, mentors, and professionals that you connect with to enhance your learning and take charge of your own professional development. Today more teachers use tools like WhatsApp and Facebook to acquire new knowledge. They subscribe to personal and professional blogs. Or they ask questions through their social media networks to get the most relevant answers from the members of their PLN.

The following video explains more about Personal Learning Networks (PLNs).

Characteristics of a Personal Learning Network

To understand the value of a PLN, What does a PLN do:

Open collaboration without limits
An opportunity to share ideas, resources, and learning materials with educators anywhere in the world
A way to gain perspective on your practice
Maintained on personal social media accounts like Facebook or WhatsApp
Enhanced by following useful blogs and video content on sites like YouTube
A way to share your knowledge with others
Created by an individual teacher or administrator to meet personal goals

Benefits of Personal Learning Networks

PLN’s virtual components are not limited by time and geography. You can access parts of your virtual network at any time from anywhere using a variety of internet-based media and social networking tools. These virtual tools enable you to connect with teachers from all around the world and have access to material that can help you improve your teaching. Benefits of having PLN:

Your learning, your choice
Have people you can reach out to and support on your schedule
Embrace the concept of lifelong learning that we want our students to adopt
Helps meet the expectations of our employers regarding continuous professional improvement

How to start your own PLN

Start small! Choose one resource, one site or one tool to get started.
1. 1. For example, you may choose to start a WhatsApp group and add other teachers to collaborate with.
Look for options that fit your learning preference and time constraints.
Give it a chance! Try a tool for a while before making a decision about whether to continue to use it.
Can’t keep up with postings on a blog, listserv, Twitter, etc? You don’t need to go back and read everything you missed. Don’t avoid going there because you feel guilty/bad about not keeping up, or worry about having missed something important. It’s okay to only do/read what you can when you can.
Try setting aside a reasonable amount of time (for you) or identify a particular day (or two) that you will devote to your PLN. Try to keep to your plan, but don’t beat up on yourself if you don’t.
Many of us start by just looking around on sites taking advice from expecters who know how to code and have working experience. Don’t pressure yourself to post or comment right away (or ever, although a benefit of sharing is to add to the group’s knowledge)

Have a look at Edublogs they offer a free course on how to build your PLN.

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