My Personal Learning Network

Over the semester I had a hard time understanding the benefits of a PLN (Personal Learning Network). I think it had something to do with the fact that Dr. Strange's PLN is set to accommodate his career and interests. Somehow I was convinced my PLN had to be beneficial to me as a teacher to help further my career on down the road. What I have now realized is that a PLN is meant to benefit a person individually. My needs right now for my current career are nothing like Dr. Strange's or Mr. Chamberlin's. They both have fantastic examples of uses and benefits from them, but neither of them have a PLN similar to my current needs.

In the future I plan on being an educator, but right now my full time career is a student. My PLN needs to reflect that. To do so I need to make connections with people who are going through the same things academically I am that way I will always have resources to assist me when I am stuck on an assignment. A PLN that would fit my needs includes my fellow students who can help me collaborate on different class assignments. It can also include current professors and former teachers from high school.

Another challenge I faced with my PLN is where to contact people. Twitter does seem to be the uprising new 'it' thing for social networking, but I personally do not access it too often and niether do my friends who also have an account on Twitter. I decided to base mine on Facebook instead. It is another social networking site, but is something I use quite regularly along with the rest of my fellow students and a lot of my former teachers and some professors. I made this decision because in order for my PLN to be useful by any means it must be based off of something that is reliable.

After I finally cam to the conclusion of how I could best benefit from a PLN and where it would be best located, Irealized a PLN is something I had seemed to be utilizing all semester without realizing it. In each and every one of my classes I have at least one contact person who I can send a message and get answers to the questions I might have about a certain class. Many of thes people are also going into similar fields as myself so there is a large chance I will most likely maintain the connection and use it to benefit myself later on once I start my teaching career. As time goes by I hope to aquire more connections. This is just a starting point that will hopefully trigger some much bigger things for me later on.