A personal learning network is a practical approach to professional development for music educators. Packed schedules, the lack of musically trained substitute teachers, and budget restrictions make conference/workshop attendance difficult for many public school educators. In addition, music educators are often the only teacher in their field within the building, providing little opportunity for scholarly discourse. A PLN alleviates these concerns by creating a network for the acquisition of new knowledge and global communication.
I believe the most challenging aspect of creating my own PLN will be to limit myself to the number of blogs, wikis, etc. that I am following in order to not be overwhelmed by information. After only a limited amount of exploring I find that it is hard to set aside time to comb through all the new posts that are highlighted on my Google Reader page without getting 'caught' in hours of reading. Perhaps I will need to establish a time slot in my day/week that will be devoted to this task. Also, I will need to work out a system that better organizes my immediate needs at the time. For example, can I prioritize certain topics at a given moment? While researching my topic for MUED 444 I will want to give those posts more energy than the generic music education sites. Is there a way to control my settings to allow this to happen?
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A good PLN does create the challenge of dealing with a lot of information. I've found that I read what I'm able to and don't worry about what I don't have time for. An couple of organizational tools that you can use in Google Reader are the use of folders (e.g., putting all of your RSS feeds dealing with a specific topic inside that folder) and the use of tags (assigning key words to resources, that can then be searched).
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