aPLaNet - Autonomous Personal Learning Networks for Language Teachers

Autonomous “Personal Learning Networks” for Language Teachers is a European Union funded project to help language educators who are not yet using social networks to understand:

• What are social networks for language educators?
• Why they should use them?
• How they can get involved?

The project will help them join and use Internet Personal Learning Network (PLN) on social networks (SNs).

aPLaNet Project process

Today PLNs are helping 1,000s of educators in their teaching practice and by showing language educators how to use a PLN, this project will aim to bring about a sea-change in the way language educators use ICT.

The project team will carry out research in to existing PLNs and Social networks to understand how they operate. They will review and report on the information and produce videos and documents. Workshops and teacher guides will be produced for educators.

The project will also build a mentoring system to support the introduction of educators new to PLNs. The mentors will be prepared and available online on a one to one basis for new teachers that want to create their own PLN.

Resources produced

The three questions will be answered by showing language educators:

1. What and how to use identified SNs (technical & teacher guides, videos)
2. What resources and support is available within a PLN (resource templates, workshops, guides, diaries)
3. How they can build their own PLN through a mentoring system, provided by existing expert users who are language educators just like themselves (Websites, mentoring system, workshops, guides)

The system will be extensively piloted through the Associate partners, 140 institutions from 33 countries that have already joined the project.

Additional resources

In addition the project will produce:

• A systematic review of the use of SNs in education
• A methodology
• Case studies
• An ICT resource filtering application to build an ever growing repository of resources

Resources will be available in Bulgarian, Czech, Greek, Spanish, English, Romanian, Turkish, German, French, Italian.

Joining the project

Educators can join the project either as piloting educators (testing the resources and mentoring system), resource providers, or by mentoring new educators who want to use social networks.