If you are a teacher immersed in online professional development, you are familiar with the acronym PLN.
A PLN is a Personal Learning Network, a group of like-minded people who share resources online related to a particular topic.
Similar to a study group, your PLN is the collection of RSS feeds, blogs, Twitter friends, and news aggregators that give you information about topics you're interested in.
I converse with my online PLN through 3 different ways:
English Companion Ning
Google Reader
Because of my PLN, I've grown tremendously in how and what I teach. Imagine if our students developed the same sort of network.
This idea was sparked by the TeachPaperless blog which explained how a teacher can let students plan what they want to learn and develop PLNs to exchange information about their interests.
A student in this Edutopia article explains how PLNs have helped her work: "My PLN has RSS feeds to tie everything onto my iGoogle page, such as new blog posts, updates on the wiki, and so on. I also have a feed from Google News so I can get live updates from the Web on recent examples of the topic I'm working on. It basically does the research for me."
How can you incorporate student PLNs in your own classroom?
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