Flickr: Editor B

Professional development and networking are vital in any field, and that’s especially true for educators.

Whether it’s coming up with fresh ideas for lesson plans and classroom activities, seeking mentorship and support from veteran educators, or cultivating resources for technology integration or for meeting state standards, teachers need one another’s expertise.

That’s why working with other educators in personal learning networks (PLNs) has become as important in an educator’s day as the time he or she spends teaching in class.

Below is a short list of PLNs that already exist, followed by some resources to help teachers build their own

1. The Educator’s PLN is a Ning site (or online platform for creating your own social network) that facilitates connections between educators. It features a slew of resources such as downloadable podcasts with education leaders as guest speakers, discussion groups with specific purposes like exploring the iPad’s use in the classroom, and links to relevant blogs, videos, resource lists, and events.
2. Powerful Learning Practice is a professional development program for progressive-minded educators. Its year-long curriculum provides cohorts of teachers with new ideas and hands-on practice in order to bolster their tech knowledge and aptitudes, rethink classroom activities to make them relevant for today’s students, find other teachers with similar goals, and build their own tech-rich learning tools. It isn’t free ($1,500 per person for a year of professional development in a school or district team or $1,000 as an individual), but teachers can usually earn education credits for their participation.
3. Classroom 2.0 is designed for those interested in sharing ideas and resources about using Web 2.0 and new media in education. This means connecting with colleagues, finding out about events, joining different groups, attending Webinars every Saturday, or simply discussing everything from online projects to financial literacy to smart phone apps.
4. EdChat began as a Twitter conversation for educators and has now expanded to a PBworks wiki that encourages the ideas spawned on Twitter that translate to practical advice. To get involved in EdChat on Twitter, search for the hashtag #edchat and join in the conversation. EdChat participants can also visit the success stories page, participate in two live conversations every Tuesday, and join the EdChat group at the Educator’s PLN.
5. edWeb.net is a free online social network that lets educators connect with colleagues, collaborate on goals and projects, form their own professional learning communities, mentor one another, and practice using a slew of new technologies. Specific initiatives within the network include a game-based learning forum that will bring teachers together with game developers to explore best practices and further the discussion — and the field.
6. Resources for Building or Finding Your Own

• These Edublog and WeConnect posts, both compiled by teacher and blogger Shelly Terrell, present a pretty exhaustive, multimedia-rich list that allows teachers to explore what a PLN is, why they should care, the research behind it, and step-by-step instructions on how to build one.
• For an even bigger list of online teacher networks, visit EducationalNetworking.com’s master list.

Educators, which learning networks do you belong to? What value have you found from collaborating with your peers?

Flickr: Rex Pe

“Humans tend to use new technology in the same way they used the old technology,” says Cleve Miller, founder and managing director of English360, an online learning and open source model for English language teachers.

“The first television broadcasts were of a man in an armchair with a microphone — exactly like the radio! It takes a while for things to sink in, for us to realize what the possibilities are.”

In partnership with Cambridge University Press, English360 gathers expert-created content and pairs it with authoring and communication tools to allow English teachers to grab what they want, piece it together as they need, and share what they make with others in their field — all free of charge. If they enroll students for a per-student fee (who are, so far, mostly professionals learning English for business and other specific purposes), the interface helps extend the classroom beyond the school building and the school day with forums, blogs, calendars, assessments, and other tools.

“When it was a Web 1.0 world, English language teaching, especially with education publishers, still followed a top-down instructional model where all the content was created somewhere by a bunch of experts,” says Miller, who’s taught English to professionals in 11 countries around the world. “The early model was that the Web was just a delivery system. But I was running a language school in Buenos Aires and I thought, now that this stuff is digital, why does it still have to be so rigid? I should be able to repurpose, resequence, an edit it to a certain degree.”

Inevitably, Miller says, “The economy of the old model — mass consumption course books designed for a global audience — led to a generic content approach.” But now, mashups are the norm, or should be, in education.

Why? Because teachers in the classroom have an understanding of a key element in education that no publisher can ever have: their students. “They know what their students needs, strengths, and weaknesses are” and content publishers do not,” he says.

Thus, a paradigm shift: When teachers use the resources that work well for them and mix it with their own self-authored content, they can create a truly customized — and therefore effective — curriculum. (This is the basic premise behind the open textbook movement).

A blended learning model is useful for language teaching, too, Miller says, because there is a rote element in learning a language and “that’s something we can do online, out of the classroom. But those repetitive, fill-in-the-gap grammar exercises are not a good use of classroom time. We need to make sure that precious face-to-face time is used for what it is best for: true communication.”

And the customizable curriculum model works for teaching English to professionals, in particular, because English for medicine, law, marketing, and other fields can get incredibly specific (called ESP, or English for Special Purposes).

One English360 client from an amusement park in Paris, for instance, is actually teaching “English for roller coaster maintenance” and “English for dolphin training,” Miller says. No traditional textbook will ever be published on that, but this teacher can create mashups of English360 content, author her own content, and, theoretically, connect with other dolphin-trainer-English-teachers in the world (the handful that exist, anyway) and share content.

“The great thing about humans is everyone’s passionate about something,” says Miller. “That’s the beauty of ‘bottom-up,’” — the Wikipedia phenomenon that’s springing up all over the Web. “If it’s open and allows people to contribute, collaborate, and participate,” ultimately — for both teachers and students — “the Web now represents one of the leading education theories out there.”