Personal Learning Network - Twitter

For those of you who have followed this blog for a while you know I've often promoted social networking, social bookmarking, and other such sites. Over the past year I've been slowly increasing my Personal Learning Network (PLN) to include more and more of those sites. PLN"s are one of those new eduspeak type terms that describes a network of people you rely on to help you keep learning. In years past those people might be your colleagues at your school, district, or people you might have met at conferences.

With the advent of the internet the creation of PLN's is becoming a bigger and more interesting task. We have many different sites to choose from to start creating a PLN. One of the most useful, and difficult to understand is Twitter. Twitter allows you to post short messages (140 characters or less) to your followers. At the same time you can "follow" others to see what they post. There are many educators currently on Twitter who share many different sites & thoughts on a regular basis. If you are looking to start your own PLN, here are a few educators worth following.

Patrick Black
Dean Shareski
Steve Dembo
Sue Waters
Kevin Jarret
Kathy Schrock
Paul Hamilton
Bud Hunt
Richard Byrne
Angela Maiers

Just by following these few educators you will start seeing interesting new uses for current curriculum and interesting sites that might help you do something new! I would recommend using a Twitter client (as opposed to following on Twitter.com) like Tweetdeck or Twhirl. Both are excellent clients to follow Tweets. You can also find clients for iPhones, Blackberries, & other phones.

If you are interested in other ways to use twitter check out these posts:


50 Ideas on Using Twitter
So you want to try Twitter
Twitter in the Classroom

I'm going to try and add some more information about PLN's in the next few days. We'll see if I'm able to do that (going to be a busy week).

Patrick


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