Learning is not a solitary task and neitheris teaching. We need to keep ourknowledge and skills updated and are dependenton knowing where to find the latestnews and ideas in our subject area.Teachers have always networked with colleaguesin the same department or institution,but seldom on a national or internationalscale, this is on the other side verynatural for researchers, to work internationallyand collaborative. Today’s socialnetworking tools make networking on aglobal scale an invaluable resource for allteachers. Building a Personal LearningNetwork (PLN) with a wide range of contactsfrom all over the world, provides asource of news, support, inspiration anddiscussion that is an invaluable and integralpart of professional development.

The workshop at NGL14 aimed to introducethe concepts of PLN and communityof practice (CoP) to teachers who have notyet developed an extensive professionalnet-based network. During the workshopparticipants worked collaboratively ingroups to discover relevant tools and networksto join and benefit from. The mediumof the workshop was net-based collaborativeworkspaces where links and notesfrom the session can be shared and whichare available for all participants long afterthe workshop is over. The workshop allowedparticipants to examine a representativeselection of the numerous online toolsavailable for networking, sharing and collaboration.