Project Focus
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Do you use social networks like Facebook & Twitter?
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Do you use them for personal reasons, to keep in touch with friends
and family or for professional reasons?
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Do you think social networks such as these can contribute to your own
professional development?
These are some of the questions we will be asking hundreds of foreign
language educators - and we hope you will be one of them - to find out
their attitudes to using Social Networking sites to create and build
their
PLN, in other words, their
Personal Learning Network
During the two years of the aPLaNet
project, we will be collaborating with our partner
institutions to create support and resources which will help foreign
language teachers in Europe to understand
and use social network in order to:
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Build and expand their PLN by connecting with educators on
Facebook, Twitter & Nings
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Continue with their professional development in
an autonomous way
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Acquire the skills and digital literacies
required in order to use these mediums successfully and
productively
Here
is an interview with Graham Stanley, one of our colleagues on
the project
PLN's
(Personal Learning Networks)
Watch this presentation of the idea of PLN's and why it is
important to connect. It was created by the CELT Athens team. To
view, press the arrow to move through the slides of the
presentation.
Today, PLN's are helping thousands of
educators in their teaching practice and by showing language educators
how to use a PLN, this project will aim to bring about a sea-change in
the way language educators use ICT.
The project team will carry out research in to existing PLNs and
Social networks to understand how they operate. They will review and
report on the information and
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produce
screencasts and videos with tutorials on how to use
social networks
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create
teacher guides for the different Web 2.0 tools
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organise workshops and webinars which will be free of charge
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build a mentoring system for 'newbies' and help them to find mentors
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make resources available in a variety of European languages
The mentoring system to support the
introduction of educators new to PLN's. The mentors will be prepared
and available online on a one-to-one basis for new teachers that want
to create their own PLN.
Resources will be available in
Bulgarian, Czech, Greek, Spanish,
English, Romanian, Turkish, German, French, Italian.
How to
get involved - Joining the project
Educators can join the project either as
piloting educators (testing
the resources and mentoring system), resource providers, or
as mentors
supporting new educators who want to use social networks.
Join by becoming a
member of the aPLaNet Ning and our Facebook group - click on the
images on the right hand column and register!
The mentoring phase
is about to begin!
