What is a PLN?

a group of people who can guide your learning, point you to learning opportunities, answer your questions, and give you the benefit of their own knowledge and experience… to provide us not only with pointers to sources of information, but to answer questions, to coach us, to reinforce our learning when we try to apply it to our work. – Daniel R. Tobin

A PLN can include fellow students, teachers, parents, friends, and relatives.  Because of the Internet your PLN can include people that live in your town but can also include people who live across the World.  We will use some web based tools to help us extend our PLN beyond Pike School’s borders.  Below is a list of some of the tools we will investigate.

• RSS Feeds
• Blogs
• Skype – Voice over IP, texting, video chatting
• Diigo – social bookmarking and research tool
• Podcasts – a series of audio and video content that can be downloaded to a computer or ipod
• Twitter – micro blogging – shorts updates of 140 characters or less about and idea, a question, or what your doing.
• Google Docs – online word processing
• Flickr – photo sharing
• VoiceThread – allows for conversations around a picture, video, document, or audio
• Youtube – vidoe sharing website
• Livebinders – online 3 ring binder.  You can organize website, pictures, videos, documents all in one place
• Wikis – a website that allows for easy creation of websites that can be edited via a web browser
• Facebook – social networking site