How a 10 week challege helped me create a great PLN

I am not sure about you but I tend to learn best when I do things (make, create, go through a process, discuss etc.). For a long time I had been listening to the benefits of Social Media from other Educators but really wasn't using it very much. I joined Twitter in 2012 when our College was involved in the Microsoft Innovative Schools program. It was during that time that I met John Goh, Principal of Merrylands East Primary School, who was a big Twitter advocate.  Despite his enthusiasm for the communication medium, I was a 'slow' adopter. It wasn't until late Term 3 2013 when John visited our College and other schools in the ACT, posting photos on Twitter during his visits, that I decided I really wanted to do more and learn more about the Social Media platform.

After some consideration I though it could be possible to accomplish the following in one term:

• stay in touch with the latest educational discussions
• learn about learning technology quickly and easily
• Build a Professional Learning Network (PLN) in your school system and beyond

So in order to learn more I decided to 'dive in' be setting some goals and posted it on this blog (My 10 Week Challenge) to keep me honest. To help me achieve my objectives I attempted to maintain the following behaviours:

1. Tweet at least once a day about our school
2. Participate in a Twitter chat(s)
3. Create a blog and post at least ten times during the term
4. Connect with people outside of my school, build a PLN, and learn new things
5. Share what I learn with our staff and post it on my blog in week 10 of term

Quick note about Blogging

Despite knowing a bit (still much to learn) about blogging - I had created a blog previously during my Master degree (Student of the Red Brown Earth) mainly to document procedures, processes and make communication with my supervisor easier while studying part-time, I was unable to maintain the blogging commitment of my personal challenge, it could be described as a #Epicfail. No excuses though, I am going to keep trying, hoping to redeem myself with this long overdue post.

What I learned

Twitter is a great way to stay connected with other educators and share ideas. My fellow educational colleagues on Twitter were very accommodating of 'Newbie's' like me. It was with some trepidation that I tried my first Twitter chat which was #Learning Frontiers. I quickly found that the connection with like minded individuals all over the country was well worth the initial leap, as I fumbled at the keyboard in a struggle to keep up with the conversation.

Twitter helped me to quickly establish a Professional Learning Network (PLN) and soon I started sharing and asking questions myself. My PLN on Twitter were very quick to respond and helped me during the course of the term. My PLN helped inform some important school based decisions around technology. And helped me organise some school visits in Sydney (Merrylands East Primary School and Northern Beaches Christian School & Microsoft Head Office ) for our staff late term four. Among other things, these visits are now helping our staff rethink the use of furniture in our school.

Thank you to everyone out there in my PLN. You have helped me learn more than I would have without Twitter. I look forward to learning and sharing more with you in 2014.

I have 'Storified' (which was a tool I learnt about on Twitter) a series of twitter posts about our College below: