My reasons for creating and participating in a Personal Learning Network are making it personal, using it for collaboration and to help become a connected educator. When you create something for your specific purposes, you can make it something of your own by only using technology that you feel is the best fit for your goals. Keeping up to date with technological advances is important if you want to provide the best education you can for all your students. One goal should be keeping up to date on the latest technologies and strategies that become available. When I create my PLN, I do not like the idea of a blog so I will not have one. I will have a discussion section instead because I feel it will be beneficial to my needs. I will also include a links section to the concepts and information I believe is important so I can get the feedback and opinions from others so to determine if their information is something that would be beneficial for my needs. Collaboration is vital to a successful educational program as it allows educators to produce ideas both inside and “outside the box” thinking. The ability to hear what others are doing, what works for them and what has not, and letting others know what I have tried and had been successful with provides a great wealth of information for everyone in that group. Being a connected educator means you can communicate and share things with other educators regardless of location or upbringing. This piggybacks on collaboration as you can work with others, even outside of your current school. Being able to hear and see what other educators are doing, what has worked and what has not worked, opens up endless possibilities to provide an even greater learning environment for our students and staff. 

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