Learning+Communities

=Professional Learning Communities=

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Nings
Nings offer a good environment to begin understanding blogs, commenting, forums, and the sharing of resources. Without downloading any tools and wanting to begin participating along with others uncertain of how to begin the best place to start is: [|Classroom 2.0]

Another great Ning is the [|Global Education Ning]

[|CSI Fellowship]

[|Discovery Education Network] DEN has a large group of participants and is a great place to connect regionally with other teachers using WEB 2.0 tools and to share resources such as lesson plans.

[|Tapped In] Meeting place to find groups gathering over common concerns

[|Webcasting Academy] A place to learn to broadcast or webcast events live on the internet and how to save them as podcasts.

Personal Learning Networks
Blogging - Using iGoogle/Google Reader. The earlier method for those willing to participate in a read/write environment. Start following bloggers who inspire or interest you subscribe to their blog, comment, and then begin reflecting on your practices and ideas in a similar manner. [|Top 50 Blogs]

Social Bookmarks
[|Delicious] One of the easiest of the bookmarking tools to use. You can share your bookmarks with students, school, other users as well as subsribe to educators with similar interests. [|Diigo] A way to bookmark but also create notes on web pages, gather articles, present ideas, as well as join groups.

Photo Sharing
[|Flickr] One of the most popular ways to share photos, find photos, and with its openness there are numerous tools to take advantage of what they have to offer.

Microblogging
If you participate at all in an IM or instant message environment and are willing to share your ideas and invest some time in meeting others this is a great place to feel connected globally to other educators. [|Liz Davis Blog post] with tutorial [|Vicki Davis] link to tutorial video [|Vicki Davis Blog post] on how she uses Twitter [|youthtwitter] [|Twitter]

Voice/Telephony/Video
This is the most popular way for teachers in a virtual environment to speak, chat, and conference with each other as well as save conversations for podcasts. If your connections to other educators in your learning network reaches a point in which you want 24 hour access this is probably the tool you will use. [|Skype]