Who is in your Personal Learning Network? Who do you share with? Talk to? Learn from? Collaborate with? Most classroom teachers will probably first think of the other folks in your grade level in your building, and perhaps other local teachers who teach the same grade level or subject.

Have you ever considered using the internet to extend your learning, not just by researching but by contact with other professionals? There are currently two very popular sites being used by technology educators, librarians, and numerous classroom teachers to create Personal Learning Networks. Each site restricts a post to 140 characters. Each site allows you to choose who you follow so you can build a network of people with similar interests to yours. Each site allows you to search for specific people or for general terms such as “teacher” so you can read posts of interest to you.

The most well known of the two sites is Twitter. You may have heard of it asking “What are you doing?” and people type in frivolous items such as “I’m eating a bologna sandwich.” However, the educational community has transformed it into something completely different. They ask for and share ideas, suggestions, and comments. I’ve been amazed at how many new web tools I have been introduced to by people that I follow on Twitter. It’s rare that I’ve asked a question that has not been answered within just a few minutes.

The second site is Plurk. This is quite similar to Twitter, but the topics become more conversational. Where Twitter tends to offer somewhat random comments, Plurk allows users to respond to questions and comments within a conversation and see other responses as well. It takes a bit more time to get used to the format, but I find that I prefer the threaded conversations in Plurk.

Feel free to follow me in either program. I’m elemtech on both. (Tina Coffey is elemitrt. Check her out while you’re there!) You can also see who we follow (mostly ed tech folks) and choose to follow them out also.

Let me know if you need help learning to navigate these cool new tools! It’s amazing to establish a network of educators from all over the world