Week 8: Personal Learning Networks

Creating personal learning networks has always been a very natural thing for me to do. Since I graduated college, I have always found advantages to building a learning network. The videos and readings, at least for me re-interate the importance of have collaborate environments that we can teach, learn and grow from to become better educators and administrators. 

Until recently, I have been always looking towards mentors, listening and learning from their experiences. I am at the point in my career now where I becoming a mentor and able to share experiences, lessons learned and best practices with our more junior teachers. For growth both personally and in our staff, I believe sharing experiences only improves working relationships among staff, and with those throughout our school district.

With technology, we now have a greater ability to expand our PLN's not only regionally, but globally as well. For example check out this Pinterest example of an educational PLN. Just on this one example alone - the options are overwhelming! And there is an interest group for just about any type of PLN group you may want to join, gain and share experiences with. 

We all have these networks from peers within our school, courses we enroll in and workshops we attend, as our careers evolve so have our PLNs and it is only going to improve with technology and the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds, join communities with common interest as well as courses such as this one, where we need to virtually collaborate and share ideas.