You may have heard colleagues talk about their PLNs—their personal learning networks—or you may have one of your own. But just what is a personal learning network, and why is it so helpful for educators? What is a PLN? A personal learning network consists of the people, places, and things that help you learn. By definition, every lifelong learner has a PLN, whether the person realizes it or not. Also, every person who has a PLN is a lifelong learner. Let’s imagine, for example, that you are a relatively new teacher.

Photo by flattop341 You may have never tried project-based learning, or you may teach in a purely PBL environment. Whatever your background, you’ll find that PBL can be a powerful instructional approach. Here are ten reasons why. Adult life is project based. Most tasks that adults complete are projects, from simple duties like doing laundry and baking cookies to major endeavors like finding a job or renovating a home. Adults rarely listen to lectures, take notes, and pass tests. Instead, they take on projects.

Photo courtesy of thepurplefreak from Flickr Creative Commons. Do you know what a mouse potato is? It’s a person who spends too much time staring at a computer screen. Mouse potatoes are the couch potatoes of the 21st century. In fact, Merriam Webster just added the term mouse potato to its august dictionary. Perhaps you know a few mouse potatoes. Perhaps you are one. But just learning the term mouse potato suddenly makes you think about how much time you spend in front of the computer. That’s the power of vocabulary. It enables thinking.

How can you shift your classroom away from lecture and toward inquiry? You can get help from the modern phenomenon known as crowdsourcing—the practice of putting many minds to work on a single problem. Inquiry is, in effect, crowdsourcing in your classroom. What Crowdsourcing Concepts Can Help Me? The following four concepts from crowdsourcing can help you use more inquiry in your classroom. Distributed Computing. While the term crowdsourcing is relatively new, the idea has been around for a while.

Belief that you can become smarter and more talented opens the doorways to success. That’s what twenty years of research has shown Carol Dweck of Stanford University. She has identified two opposing beliefs about intelligence and talent, beliefs that strongly impact our ability to learn. Though the fixed mindset has traditionally held sway, many recent studies show that the growth mindset better represents our abilities. Our brains are much more elastic than previously thought, constantly growing new connections.

Photo courtesy of marinakvillatorofrom Flickr Creative Commons. “Look, Mom! See the turtle! He is scaly!” Spend a day with a small child, and you will hear many such observations. That’s because all of us have an innate human desire to teach. Somehow what we learn isn’t real until we share it with someone else. “Watch what I can do! Let me show you how!” The exclamation points are almost mandatory, because we want to teach. “Show and tell” is one of the most popular times in elementary school—the chance for students to become teachers.

As you know, group work can give teachers headaches and students nightmares. If set up poorly, collaborative projects often result in one person doing all of the work, while others contribute minimally or actually disrupt. Arguments, inefficiency, mess, and chaos follow closely. When set up well, though, group work taps into the power of collaboration. Here are 5 keys to setting up successful student collaborations. Download a free Word template. Define individual success.

Photo courtesy of rupjones from Flickr Creative Commons. People say that Stonehenge was built to be a giant calendar that marks the winter and summer solstices. To me, that claim has always seemed a little odd. Who would spend 1,500 years building a calendar out of stone? Invent paper, people. But let’s think of a calendar in deeper terms. A calendar doesn’t just track the days of a year. It tells which days are significant and why: Mardi Gras, Passover, Tax Day, Bastille Day, Election Day, New Years. . . .

The Internet began as a U.S. military computer network meant to survive a nuclear attack. ARPANET, developed in the 1960's, stored information in a broad network of computers linked by distributed hubs so that an attack against one or more hubs could not bring down the entire thing. Decentralized. Interconnected. Robust. Nuke-Proof. Wouldn't it be great if you could get your students to build the same kind of neural networks around the subjects you teach? How can you move beyond superficial, short-term learning to create learning that sticks?

In order to get students to think critically, you need to help them break through their mechanical thinking and manage their emotional thinking. What is mechanical thinking? When students think mechanically, their brains are just repeating looped recordings of thought without considering them. For example, students might have the mechanical thought, “I'm not good at math.” It just crops up in their brains whenever they look at a math problem.