For the last six weeks or so I have been interacting with a myriad of educators, superintendents and teachers, in America as an ‘expert voice’ in a Ning administered by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Will Richardson. The idea is that six ‘expert voices’ from around the globe are asked to contribute their voice and assist in the building of a Personal Learning Network for those educators.

I am most honoured and humbled to be invited into such an austere community and hope that my contributions have proved to be worthwhile. As the first round draws to a close I would hope that some of those connections made can continue from outside of that Ning.

Because our school holidays were on I was able to join in a couple of Elluminate sessions with the cohort. It was great to be able to participate live in rich conversations about harnessing the power of the connections made on the web to create a Personal Learning Network.

In this introductory video Will talks about how we might build these networks, how they might look, the transformative nature of a PLN and how we might help children navigate their own networks safely, ethically and effectively.

I am so looking forward to facilitating the 14 schools in the Discover IT Tasman ICT cluster throughout 2008 achieve just those sort of connections. In case you haven’t heard via Twitter I have taken leave from Appleby School for 2008 and will work as a roaming ICT facilitator based in Motueka.

What a wonderful opportunity for me learn and make a whole lot of new face to face connections and develop that sort of network with students and teachers so close to home.

Exciting times are ahead.

View my page on TechnospudProjects My on-line friend, Jen Wagner, has recently created a Ning for primary school teachers as a place to met up, share ideas and find other teachers around the world who want to collaborate on global projects and meet up with other like minded teachers. Joining this Ning would be a great way to join a PLN, Personal Learning Network, and move out of just sharing your learning with your class, school or parent community.

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Lisa Parisi, from New York, and I have recently collaborated on a Hemispheres Wiki. Lisa’s class set a couple of questions that could best be answered by people living in the Southern Hemisphere and we set about answering them from our own experiences showing photos and videos of our findings. The seasonal differences were highlighted by our class photos on the ‘about page’. Lisa’s children were standing in their playground surrounded by snow and mine were on the beach.

And just so you know- we found that water in the Southern Hemisphere twirls in an anti-clockwise direction when going down a sink plug hole!