Recipe for beginners… growing your PLN

I’ve been working for the past several months educating teachers and administrators on the importance of growing their online PLN. We start by discussing that we all have a personal and/or professional learning network and then we identify the importance of our own professional growth. Many can easily get overwhelmed with the plethora of networking possibilities online these days.  In order to help others navigate through this mass of information, I suggest they follow this step by step recipe for building their PLN.

Step 1:

Set-up a Google reader account and start by adding subscriptions to both professional websites and blogger sites.  I suggest starting with only 3-5 subscriptions and to commit to checking it at the least weekly. Google reader is an RSS aggregator that allows you to go to one place to read all the new postings from the sites you subscribe to. It is a real time saver because you can easily scan new postings from the sites you subscribe to and only read what you find interesting.

Who should you follow? There are many lists of blogs out there, check out the blogs I follow on the right or go to these lists: education blogs by discipline , 100 best blogs for teachers of the future. Remember, starting out with only 3-5 really good blogs and/or other websites is a good way not to get too overwhelmed with the information.  Also, make sure you have a mix, since only subscribing to professional websites may limit your information input.

If you know others who have a google reader account start sharing some of the best posts that you read, and add others to your sharing group. This creates a small, very controlled PLN and also will show you the power of sharing resources.

Step 2:

Sign up for a twitter account.  There has been a huge explosion of educators using twitter in order to collaborate, share, and learn from others all over the globe. Why twitter? This article shows the power of twitter as a professional development resource, “Twittering, Not Frittering: Professional Development in 140 characters”. Here are some great resources for getting started: Twitter 101 for educators, @cybraryman’s twitter page, Twitter support FAQs.

I started by following these lists: @ShellTerrell has developed a great list of educators to follow, @MNHS_Principal also developed a great list of Educational Administrators to follow, there is also a great wiki twitter4teachers that has teacher twitter lists by content.

At first simply ‘lurk’ by logging on when you can and reading the tweets of the people you are following.  When you feel comfortable start ‘retweeting’ (resending someone elses tweets to your PLN). The next step would be to start sending tweets with great links you found on your google reader and answering tweets sent out by others. Remember, twitter is a give and take, in order to build a diverse PLN you will need to be actively involved in the PLN. The more active you are the more followers you will get, the more value you will receive.

Step 3:

Once you see the power of having information at your finger tips, through google reader and twitter, you will want a way to save all the great websites you have acquired. Social bookmarking is your answer, and delicious is a great one to get started with it. (Some like diigo as well, it really is your choice.) The power of having delicious is like having your bookmarks/favorites available to you from any computer, organized in bundles and tags, and then being able to share them with whoever you want.  So, if you are an administrator you can share your delicious bookmarks with your staff.  You can also search other delicious accounts for information about any topic you want. It’s like having your own personal search staff out there saving great websites that you can later search by tag and find.

Going beyond…

Once you start networking with your new online PLN you will learn about other forums out there. Ning is a great social networking platform that has several educational groups who have set up networks. It’s a nice way to add another component to your PLN. You can see my forums listed on the sidebar. The Educator’s PLN ning is a great resource and has amazingly committed collaborators who facilitate it.

We, as educators, are standing at the precipice of a new day. A day when we are no longer isolated in our classrooms and school buildings.  We have the ability to be global lifelong learners, by taking these three steps you can open the door to an amazing professional development experience, one shared by educators around the globe.

Go forth and prosper intellectually.  May the force of the PLN be with you.