Having a great PLN is critical to your success as an educator. There are many ways that you can turn your PLN into a PLC. One of the ways that you can do this is by actively engaging in conversations with your PLN. Rather than just passively reading things that other people post.
Using my Twitter account, I had a conversation with some of my colleagues from the PD that I went to call Great Expectations. They are a really amazing group of people and I really enjoyed my conversation with them. I posted the question to them “what are some things that you do in your classroom to engage students?” I had a really great conversation with many of them and it turned into a really great learning session for all of us. While many of the things that they talked about only applied to in-classroom students, there were a couple of things such as asking students questions to get them engage that don’t necessarily pertain to the subject.
Creating learning communities and working together is the only way that we can improve ourselves as educators. While it’s great to do individual research, there is something to be said for the community and many minds coming together to collaborate on ideas. There are many things that I have learned that I would not have learned without consolidating my fellow educators. One of the things that I plan on doing in the future is posing more questions to learning communities and following more people more closely on social media.
Look at you reaching out to your PLN! 🙂 The next step is to join a Twitter chat. You’ll be hooked!