Your PLN and PLE

You do have a PLN and a PLE right?

Okay, what am I talking about now? PLN stands for Personal (or Professional)Learning Network and a PLE stands for Personal (or Professional)Learning Environment. We all need professional development. With all of the web 2.0 technologies available to anyone, professional development no longer means attending an expensive conference and staying in a fancy hotel. We can now create our own method of professional development.

You can buy software or pay a fee to have a PLE or you can create your own. The key to any great PLE is an even greater PLN. We all learn from each other and we all want to learn from the best. It used to be that you'd have to attend a conference or workshop to learn form the best. With social networking tools like twitter and ning you can create your own PLN.

I participated in an online webinar last night hosted by PBS Teachers. If you are not familiar with PBS Teachers, check it out at http://www.pbs.org/teachers/. Targeted at K12 but still a lot of greate resources for anyone in education. The session was on using the summer to develop your PLN. If you're not familiar with PLN or PLE or social media and it's value as a PLN, this webinar is a great place to start. If you missed the webinar visit the website at http://sites.google.com/site/summertimeurpln/ . Start by working through each of the links at the left, stage one do the suggested reading. You'll be on your way to a great PLN. You can add me to your PLN: http://www.twitter.com/bthat. I have to admit that I'm not all that exciting but check out who I follow. Some of the best in education and web 2.0.