Below is an awesome PLN success story! I writing this as a means of encouragement for the teachers in my building [and yours] who haven’t yet bought into structuring up their PLN!
Ms Hubbell is one of the co-authors of Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works. After our initial training, we’ve arranged for her to give a follow-up webinar on incorporating technology with these strategies. I couldn’t wait to share this with my central office staff – now we are building on this! Talk about a valuable resource!
Our district is planning on implementing the research based instructional strategies from Classroom Instruction that Works. Building a common language around proven strategies is going to make a serious impact. As I began searching for training/delivery materials, I reached out to my PLN through Twitter with the simple question of who has experience with initial CITW training?
In a matter minutes I got this response from Elizabeth Hubbell [@erhubbell]:
After a quick call, we talked and collaborated on our needs and what Ms Hubbell can offer West Middle School.
Ms Hubbell is one of the co-authors of Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works. After our initial training, we’ve arranged for her to give a follow-up webinar on incorporating technology with these strategies. I couldn’t wait to share this with my central office staff – now we are building on this! Talk about a valuable resource!The awesome piece to this is how the students at West Middle School win! Our teachers are about to receive some great training that will make a direct bearing on student learning.
This is a great success story for developing and using your PLN! Earlier this year, I’ve lead a couple of training sessions on building a PLN using Twitter and Diigo. I shared this with staff members at our next faculty meeting. We all have need for a PLN: trainers can always use help in with better resources, administrators need to collaborate on building vision, teachers always need to improve upon lessons- the PLN is the way to make that happen.
Below, I’m asking everyone who reads this and actively supports their PLN to share a success story as well. I’ve stressed that these experiences couldn’t happen with a typical email/web search experience.
My PLN experience is unique and yields incredible results, please share one of your experiences.
Derek L. McCoy 
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