Is your personal learning network working? Have you expanded to a point that you are learning and sharing with others what you learn and do in the classroom on a day-to-day basis? What’s better than learning from each other, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
For those I’ve already lost, let’s back up and look at what personal learning networks are all about. Personal Learning Networks comes from connecting and following others on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and many others. I have two Facebook accounts that I’ve set up. One is for personal and the other is professional. The personal one is used for connecting to friends and family and seeing what they are doing in their lives. What I want to focus on is my professional Facebook page.
It is here that I connect to those that are in my profession as an educator and instructional technologist. On this account I can post many videos and blogs that I find on the Internet dealing with my profession. Likewise, my friends are doing the same things. From this, there is always so much to learn when you have many eyes scouring the Internet for news about educational change, resources, and what’s going on. Sure, I still find out what is going on in their lives, and that’s great, but it also helps me grow as a professional from the many things they post about our profession. I’ve also joined a Facebook group that I access through my Facebook account. The group I belong too is made up of 374 members, as of today, that share resources and thoughts on educational topics (no family stories here). Many times they ask questions of the group looking for replies from others on an educational topic.
I have a Twitter account that I use only for professional postings. There are many resources available for education that I post. Blogs are another learning tool where many educators share their lessons and thoughts and I share links to these sites. I follow many educators on a daily basis to learn what they are learning. In fact, twitter has educational chats taking place every week on various subjects with educators around the world. Check out this link (http://www.cybraryman.com/chats.html) to find out when these take place.
As individualized learning keeps growing, we need to teach our students how to build their own learning network. It’s part of the ISTE standards and Common Core State Standards to teach our students proper use of social networks. (Digital Citizenship). We need to model for them that learning can be fun by connecting to things that are of interest to them. The Internet opens the world to everyone.
Watch this short YouTube video on this subject.
I hope this challenges you to get more connected as a professional. You’ll be glad you did, and so will your students.