Week 7: My PLN

I think about how easy we have it as teachers now in regards to the wealth of information available at our fingertips. No longer are the days of getting ideas strictly from the textbook or from teachers within your building.   With the stroke of a key, you can get information from many teachers, in many places throughout the world.  The tricky part for me is narrowing down that wealth of information and finding ideas that will specifically help enhance my own learning and teaching. This is where PLNs come in.

A Professional Learning Network can be defined as:   

"a reciprocal network that you create to learn from, connect with, gather information or resources, create with and finally share what you have learned.  A PLN can occur in your school, face-to-face, online, at conferences or through reading, reflecting and sharing."

My experience with creating a professional learning network is growing with this class.  I follow people on twitter, use Google Reader to subscribe to other teacher's blogs, belong to a few nings like Classroom 2.0 and belong to some science listserves.  While I have mainly used these tools for gathering information and ideas, I have yet to actually join in and share my knowledge.

Often times I feel I have nothing to share.  I don't have moments where I think, "Wow, I should share what I have just done. Others would like to hear about it." I feel that there are others out there with much more knowledge and better ideas than me.  I guess this is a hurdle I will have to overcome.  I need to get comfortable with sharing ideas and feeling like my ideas are, at least, good. 

This is a site I found helpful in understanding what a PLN is and where to begin with all of the different tools: What is a PLN and why do I need one?