The Path To Being Connected

There is no comparison to the open-ended opportunity of professional growth than the opportunity provided when you build a Professional/Personal Learning Network (P2LN). Yet, very few educators participate in Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, or many others. This may be the problem, all the choices.

So why is it that very few educators connect through social networking? In the book Personal Learning Networks explores the situation as two problems and a challenge (Richardson & Mancabelli, 2011) The first problem is that educators don’t have a grasp of what the change means or they don’t see a path to implement and second, they are not asking for it. The challenge is that we have to make sure students can pass traditional tests and we have to learn and teach with tools that cannot be measured. We have to learn and teach in different ways that leverage the power of modern networks.

In Fresno Pacific’s Educational Technology Masters ET735 course, we took a deep dive into building a professional educator online presence and developing an extensive P2LN. The course focuses on and recommends Twitter, a Website, and Blogging as the three main social networks to connect. I find all three to be extremely valuable and provide a plethora of resources to connect with and curate into organized, shareable information.

My experience with Twitter was extremely powerful. I am now following 224, most of which are educators. I also use Twitter to follow politics, hiking, nature, and special events. The beauty of Following is that you can unfollow once the event is over. Politics never ends!

I started getting involved in Twitter Chats in January. My outreach was limited to one per week. Through the weekly activity of Follow 5, Find 5, and Take 5 (Whitaker, Zoul, & Casas, 2015) who I follow and what I share has become more professionally focused with a more global reach. My chats now provide a wide variety of pertinent content. My caution is; it is all very addictive.

Blogging is another area that I dabbled in years ago. Most everyone I talk about Blogging with respond with either, “I really don’t have that kind of time” or “I always wanted to do that, but just have not taken the time.” Blogging does take time. It not only takes time, it takes creativity, critical thinking, often some research and perseverance to complete. Are these not the exact skills we want our students do develop?

I do recommend reading other professionals Blogs as often as possible. I do most of my professional Blog reading on LinkedIn. Through the course project of evaluating a connected educator website, I discovered many great educators that produce writing as extensive as published articles to short, thought provoking stories. Blogs come in all sizes. Again, the Follow 5, Find 5, Take 5, (Whitaker et al., 2015) provided many great writers to choose from.

Through the encouragement of our professor, I began writing my reflections as Blogs. We were also encouraged to deliver our projects, such as our video recording and screencast, in a Blog post. I found this to be a great way to develop my writing skills and an excellent way to model sharing my learning experiences with peers and students.

We also discovered many tools to add to our websites and Blogs. I found Twitter Widgets Follow Me, and Tweet Me to be helpful in getting content connected. We also learned how to use a tool called Pingomatic (Elwell, n.d.) to draw readership.

Last but certainly not least, building the professional educator website. This project brought out a lot of creativity in me beginning with the sketching. It was painful, but it forced me to slow my thinking and design planning. By reviewing the sketches as I go, I have made some visual changes and included some specific content I had forgotten.

I made the choice to learn something new. Wix.com sites intrigue me. Their templates are extremely fashionable and visually exciting with embedded video backgrounds that, if not careful, can be distracting. There was a large learning curve for me on this, but once again, the skill of perseverance paid off. I love my site. It is a work in progress as I plan on continually updating and adding resources. It also has inspired me to create resources such as screencast and video content. Visit me at: Ed Tech At A Glantz

How better to model a connected educator than with a professional site that includes personally created multi-media, Blogs and valuable curated resources. Even better yet, model and use this process for students to create and share their learning experiences and leveraging the power of connected networks to allow students to be critical thinkers, producers and digitally responsible citizens.

Elwell, W. (n.d.). How to Use Pingomatic to Ping Your Site! - YouTube. Retrieved June 12, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlulwW5sxmQ

Richardson, W., & Mancabelli, R. (2011). Personal Learning Networks. Using the Power of Connections to Transform Education. Solution Tree Press.

Whitaker, T., Zoul, J., & Casas, J. (2015). What Connected Educators Do Differently. Routledge.