2.0 Exploring

Okay, the PLN video titled "Building a PLN with Web 2.o Tools" was pretty hard for me to follow. The analogy of a PLN being like a buffet made me pretty hungry, but didn't really give me much information. I liked the reference to 'second life', which I remember Dwight Schrute playing in an episode of The Office...

Anyways, I was of the misunderstanding that a PLN was another Google Reader type thing that gathered, condensed, and organized everything for you. Now I know that it is pretty much just the accumulation of everything that I do to connect, share, and learn with other people across the globe. I already have a pretty good handle on personal networking sites like facebook and other things we have covered in class (blogs, RSS feeds, etc), so I decided to take a look at some of the links on the Creating a PLN website.

I think the education communities like

http://teachershare.scholastic.com and http://www.pbs.org/teachers/connect/

could be incredibly useful for teachers like us who are just getting started. There are a whole ton of "mentor" teachers out there who have lots of experience and lots of great teaching ideas. We can use the resources and information to become effective and insightful teachers. Then, when we're old and gray, we can give back to the community the way we were given. It's like the teaching circle of technological life!