Personal Learning Networks (PLN) can take a variety of forms, and be as involved as you want them to be. Meaning that you could be a silent subscriber and follow blogs, articles, social networks or communities and add very little of your own to these posts. You could simply read what others have contributed and reflect on tips, tricks, attitudes, pedagogy and other philosophies as they pertain to your own teaching and your own classroom. Or you could be a blogger, and active contributor with posts, comments, and other contributions. Or you could have a range of anything in-between The beauty of the PLN is that it is free, it is personal and can be customized to fit exactly what you want. Before you dive right in to a fully functional PLN, I would advise taking baby steps to become comfortable with the format, and online security, and your digital footprint before you start contributing globally.
Baby Step #1 
The PLN is an important piece of being a well rounded educator. Creating your own learning network helps keep you informed of cutting-edge news, views, tool, application and best practice in education. With the availability and ease of access of technology tools, a PLN is a very quick and easy community to build and collaborate. Again, collaboration can take a variety of forms. It useful to create a network and follow what other say, to reflect on your own practice and obtain new ideas to use with your own students. A good first step to creating a PLN would be to find sources that pertain to your interests and organize them into one location to quickly check. For example if you use a news feed resource like Feedly to stay current with world news, and you also use Facebook for a PLN you can go here and get the rss link for your Facebook notifications and add it to your news feed reader of choice. That way you can minimize the amount of places you need to navigate to to keep current with your PLN and daily news. Within your news feeder you can create a category that is dedicated to your PLN. I use Feedly as my news reader of choice. It is very easy to customize and easily allows you to organize content in a way that makes sense for you. Another first step would be to create a group or circle on a social media site you may or may not use. For example, if you use facebook to keep current with friend gossip, there is a good chance that some of those people are educators, similarly there is a good chance that you are friendly with coworkers and other people in the education world. Create a group or circle of these individuals for your own ease of access.
Baby Step #2
As you build your PLN, a good first step would be to become part of the communities that interest you, and follow the conversations. As you become more comfortable with checking these sources and staying current you could jump to the next level and start recording your own reflections, ideas, and advice through a blog or other online journal format. If you use a blog, there are settings to make it private so your thoughts are not yet visible to the entire digital world, or if you use something like Google drive to create a journal it is easy to make that private as well. Reflection is an important process in learning. As you create and participate in your PLN, it is important to process the information you acquire. As much as you think that you will remember what you read, it is a good idea to keep track of the things you agree with, don't agree with, and describe any alterations you would make to ensure that something you read is the best fit for your own needs. As you start recording and reflecting on things you discover in your PLN and are comfortable checking your news sources, reflecting on tips and tricks and even trying some things in your own teaching. You could start contributing to your PLN. Again, since the PLN is created by you, and tailored to your interests, it is a good chance that the blogs you follow don't know who you are. However, you have ideas and opinions that are worth communicating.
Baby Step #3
Once you are comfortable checking news sources, and finding cutting edge tools and pedagogy within education, and are reflecting on things you learn, your contribution is important. A big part of the PLN is contributing. Whether you believe it or not, your opinions, attitudes, experience, and ideas are worth sharing. This step can take a variety of forms. As I mentioned before, your PLN may include blogs, news sources, Google Plus, facebook feeds, twitter feeds...etc. All of which you may not necessarily contribute. Before you start to contribute to your PLN you have to be aware of your digital footprint, and citizenship to participate respectfully and your contributions are well received You could start adding comments and questions to these blogs or news feeds. The form of your reflections may take on a different persona and can actually be published as part of your PLN. If you organized a group of individuals on a social media site like Google Plus and have individuals that you personally know, it is time to alert them of the PLN. This could be a formal explanation of the intentions, or it could just be a comment or question relating to something you read in your PLN. As comments start rolling back in you are on your way to creating an environment where the contributions will be valuable and become an extension of a productive faculty or team meeting.
The PLN is a great tool for the individual to expand their own horizons as an educator. There are ranges of involvement and levels for which you can contribute and participate in a PLN. I would recommend that the most low key PLN would be the most beneficial. As soon as it starts to feel like work or become a burden, you will lose motivation and stop participating. Look at this way, as an educator you are probably already constantly looking at things in your everyday life saying "whoa that's great, how can I incorporate that into my classroom?" A PLN is a place to have those moments and share what you did. It is an important piece of education, especially with the ease of collaboration.
Global communication has vastly improved and evolved along with technology. Communicating with students from another country was much slower and more difficult to arrange. I remember having a "pen-pal" from England in my 4th grade class. I remember writing a letter and waiting a few weeks for a response. The communication was slow, yet the anticipation of a response was much more exciting. Now global communication happens almost instantly. Social networking has vastly evolved with technology to allow people to stay connected regardless of location. As long as they have access to internet, they can create an account and make connection. Social networking tools like google +, facebook, twitter, pinterest, Devianart, springpad, linkedin, Ning..etc. The list goes on and on. Some of these tools can be useful with global communication in the classroom, however they also require some caution. Social networking sites open up the potential "stranger-danger" anxiety and the risk of "cyber-bullying." As an educator the use of social networking sites requires a lot of monitoring, and a level of training to understand how to secure the networking and ensure that users are safe.
Other tools that are specific built for schools to collaborate may provide more structure for teachers and students to ensure that there is still some level of control and that safety net is in place for the users. A few sites that provide this structure and can easily connect classrooms are:
The Global Learning Collaborative - The Global Learning Collaborative, in partnership with Asia Society, is a member of the International Studies Schools Network. Our common goals are to help students on a path to college readiness and global competency. As a member of the Brandeis Educational Complex, we are able to provide our students with a breadth of academic and extra curricular experiences catering to a wide array of interests and abilities, and as a small school, we truly get to know and support each student, attending to unique needs and goals, with a focus on global citizenship.
Taking it Global - Vision: Youth everywhere actively engaged and connected in shaping a more inclusive, peaceful and sustainable world. Mission: Empowering young people to understand and act on the world's greatest challenges. Purpose: We facilitate global understanding and grow leadership among youth to enhance their participation in social movements for a better world.
ePals - The ePals approach provides an effective way to instruct and reach today's technology savvy students and teachers. ePals provides digital content designed for collaboration and self-paced, self-directed learning as well as a safe platform to share work globally. Authentic ePals projects are centered around meaningful content and experiences that require teamwork, digital literacy skills, higher-level thinking and communication. By engaging in authentic learning experiences about relevant issues, students, teachers and mentors learn and work together, strengthening core learning while motivating learners and building self-confidence and skills necessary for future careers. At the same time, ePals helps teachers learn to use technology effectively in their classrooms, providing professional development, curriculum, contests and other resources.
These three tools have the potential to easily link your classroom with other classrooms globally. It increases the likelihood of collaboration globally. Where the social networking sites require a bit more "leg" work to find and "friend" individuals from around the world. If a teacher were to expand their classroom for global collaboration they would need appropriate training and support. Different types of lesson planning are involved when students are required to be good digital citizens and be good representatives of the school. This website provides some lesson plans, and ideas for teachers to use with their students to help prepare them to be respectful digital citizens during collaboration The teacher and students should be well prepared to collaborate globally and understand the potential difficulties and challenges when working with other students, teachers, and schools via technology.
Web 2.0 tools are online based tools that are free to access and have the potential to enhance education. There are a variety of tools for different platforms and different learning. The majority of these tools allow the user to be the "producer, creator, and collaborator," (Rethinking Learning: The 21st Century Learner | MacArthur Foundation, Retrieved from www,Youtube.com, 2013). The use of any Web 2.0 tool will provide a different perspective for the students to learn the content. The typical "chalk and talk" type of teaching and learning is fading away. Students seem to enjoy learning the content better, when they can apply their creativity using a tool to present their knowledge in unique ways, that differ from that traditional research paper or lab report. A time line project, or news story type of project can come to life with a web 2.0 tool like Meograph. It is much easier for students to capture video, sound, images and edit that data to fit into a variety of formats.
Remember these tools? It wasn't that long ago that these where hard to come by, and were one of the only ways you could capture video at home. You needed to have a VHS tape, a VHS player and editor to run the film back and capture the decent moments. It was a much lengthier process to stitch a video together to make a 5-10 minute film for a class project. Now students and most individuals can capture video on their cell phones, upload the video to youtube, edit the film, add music, still images, or animations to enhance the video and make a more attractive 10 minute video.
Web 2.0 tools have the potential to engage students on a different level, where they have more ownership over the assignment, and have the freedom to express their knowledge creatively Schools need to embrace this technology and provide appropriate training to educators to learn how to include tools like this into the typical classroom. The use of a word processing program is a step towards technology integration, but word processing isn't the only thing technology can do. Instead of typing a research paper, the student could record a podcast lecture of the topic, and enhance the podcast with images and animation. It is still a valid skill to stand in front of a group of people and speak, but delivering a more discussion based presentation after the audience has heard the podcast, or watched the video makes for a much more engaged audience. These tools have the ability to bring learning to a different level and engage students. The difficulty is providing the training and education to the teachers, so they are confident in using these tools to replace the lecture, the worksheet, the textbook reading assignment and the typical multiple choice test.
Sources
Rethinking Learning: The 21st Century Learner | MacArthur Foundation, Retrieved from www,Youtube.com, 2013
