TLN-PLN as PLC (Professional Learning Communities)

There has been a lot of talk recently about PLNs (Personal Learning Networks). I have been reading and listening, but not really thinking about how much this really has to do with ME. Right after coming off of my year traveling as Florida's Teacher of the Year, I was invited to join a listserve, TLN (Teacher Leadership Network), and they have been my PLN for years. TLN is made up of educators across the country - many are Nationally Board certified, many are former state and national teachers or the year, many are published, many are well-known in the field. They regularly invite new educators to join the group and I have been inspired by their expertise, energy and enthusiasm. TLN has evolved from a listserve to an interactive platform that is collaborative, allowing for conversation, questions, and projects. For several years now they have kept me informed and have pushed my thinking on a regular basis. If I needed to know about almost anything, I could post a question or my thoughts about a series of subjects I am interested in and get in deep, thoughtful responses. As the years have passed, I have felt like some of these educators that I have never met, have become good friends. When the idea that the world is flat became popular, I felt like I knew exactly what they were talking about because of this connectedness.

At the same time that I was growing through TLN, I began sharing an office with Melanie Holtsman, our Instructional Technologist, and Suzanne Shall, our Instructional Coach. Talk about learners! These are teachers who have a thirst for knowledge- who refuse to be satisfied and who are risk-takers. They had become involved with Twitter. I had listened to them for quite some time as they twittered back and forth between friends at school and across the world. Melanie is a Google Certified Teacher, so her network has become even more impressive of late. They have both tried to encourage me to get involved with Twitter, but... on a recent trip when I tweeted "Time for Ed" instead of "Time for bed!" and couldn't take it back (my husband of 39 years is Jim!), I decided that maybe this just wasn't the right medium for me! However, on Friday my thinking changed. I had been working for about a week on merging lots of different e-mails of book recommendations from our County Teachers of the Year. I had also been adding pictures of the book covers. I was in a time crunch. To make a long story short, I had added a recommendation that had corrupted the file. I went to school on Friday and asked if Melanie could help. She tried a few things, but basically said she didn't think it could be recovered. As a last resort, she offered to put it out on Twitter. Within two minutes she had two responses from two different people in other parts of the country describing how to fix the problem! Not that's what I call a PLN. That simple tweet saved me hours and hours of recreating a document!

Dont get me worng - I still LOVE TLN for its thoughtful, in depth discussions of issues that make me think, but I have come to believe that you just can't beat Twitter for a quick, concise response. Maybe I'll just have to visit "Ed" again!