See One, Do One, Teach One

One short year after participating in and meeting well-connected educators at Learning 2.011, and six months after EARCOS12, I was offered an opportunity to present at in my school's professional development in-service today.

Compared to many illustrious and inspiring individuals in my Personal Learning Network (PLN), my dabbling in the wide, wide world of connected educators does not add up to much. However, the combination of my LinkedIn profile, few dozen Tweets, a limited Edmodo presence, my yet-to-be-published Facebook page, and this well-intended, if skeletal, blog represents an honest attempt.

Much of my connectedness is self-directed; my husband has also been active in cultivating global contacts and resources, so I have also had a partner with whom I could exchange thoughts along the way. The development of my growing PLN is also thanks to (mostly) indirect motivation from the people with whom I have connected; a PLN's value-added.

So, my husband Kevin and I joined forces today and shared ideas and resources about creating PLN's with our colleagues. Though neither of us are experts, we focused on the vast resources and benefits of a PLN (special note: all presentation resources came to us by way of PLNs), tools we use or know about, as well as some of the trials and errors that we have made along the way (plenty!). We tried to keep the presentation pretty basic and encouraging, knowing that very few of our colleagues regularly used tools such as Twitter or LinkedIn. In fact, Twitter shut us down after numerous coworkers signed up for new accounts. Think we alerted the spam blockers?

Ideally, a few more people may now broaden their networking beyond the school walls to contribute to the global education community, learn from it, and pass the benefits along to their well-deserving students. See one, do one, teach one; it's not just for surgery anymore.