The Importance of a PLN

I heard something tonight that really struck a chord with me. During an online session of the Learning Revolution Conference Bernard Bull talked about the idea of introducing children to professional learning networks.

I love learning. I have created my own personal learning network made up of educational podcasts, newsletters, teachers I follow on twitter, and more. I am very proud of my PLN. I have found that when I am down or discouraged as a teacher, seeing other great things that teachers do gets me excited again. I try to think of ways that their great ideas can fit into my classroom.

The more I think about it, of course helping children to create a network of their own related to a topic they love makes terrific sense! Now I need to figure out how to do that. What steps should I teach first? How do I gather all of the necessary information in one place? I remember that when I taught the idea of a PLN to adult teachers, I told them to just pick one place and start there. My son loves volcanoes, so we can start his PLN by just creating a YouTube playlist of some informative volcano videos. He'll have to weed through the mess to find which ones he really wants to keep. Which ones will he really want to go back to again and again?

Now I've said it! Time to test it!