Professional Learning Networks

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This week I have been reflecting on Professional Learning Networks, or PLNs. A PLN is a group of educators (that can exist outside your immediate bubble of colleagues) that you can connect and collaborate with to expand your professional learning. Social media has allowed educators to build diverse and expansive PLNs! Torrey Trust, who is a professor of educational technology, identified four different benefits of PLNs: social, affective, cognitive, and identity. You can check out her Thinglink to view videos explaining these benefits.  After watching her videos explaining these benefits, I've concluded that the cognitive growth I've received PLNs has impacted me the most. Thanks to PLNs, I have learned about methods and resources that I've been able to bring back to my students. These include behavior management strategies, new children's literature, tech tools, specific projects, and more. This has helped me to grow cognitively as an educator. 

My PLN

One huge component of my PLN is Twitter. Twitter allows me to connect to other educators as well as ed tech companies like Seesaw, Flipgrid, ChatterPix, and more. I gain inspiration from their posts and keep up to date on new features. I enjoy sharing out what I am trying in my classroom on Twitter and I have even helped other educators who asked me questions about a couple projects. It felt great to know I helped another educator! Another part of my PLN is Facebook educator groups. I am in several groups and consider myself to be pretty active in all of them. I get a lot of benefit from reading posts and generally lurking. However, I've also posted my own questions, taken resources that were shared, and happily provided answers or ideas to other educators. It feels good to have a community to go to that is working with my specific grade level or curriculum. For example, the Bridges math curriculum groups are invaluable. Donors Choose is an example of a way for educators to crowdsource from their PLNs. I have used Donors Choose in the past as a way to raise funds for necessary educational materials - technology, books, and furniture for my kindergarten classroom. I connected my Donors Choose projects with Facebook to help crowdsource my projects and all of them were successfully funded. 

Expanding My PLN

Obviously using social media is crucial for a well rounded PLN. My goal this week was to diversify and expand my PLN. I decided to set up an RSS feed reader. I learned that an RSS feed is basically software or an application that collects specific content for you from online newspapers or blogs and puts in a convenient feed for easy viewing. I downloaded and signed up for Feedly. 

Screenshot of Laura's Feedly feed

 

Screenshot of Laura's Feedly feed

Here are a few screen shots of my feed from a couple different days this week. I have found Feedly to be fairly easy to use. When I first signed up I created a couple different feeds to organize my professional interests: general education / pedagogy, ed tech, and literacy. Then, I simply added content by searching for those topics. Feedly provided me with relevant online websites and blogs. Feedly also allows you to search Reddit for content so I was encouraged to sign up for Reddit for the first time! I will admit I've always held certain assumptions about Reddit being unsafe or containing misinformation and this has kept me off of the site. However, after searching for educational subreddits and finding some useful content (like a few good articles), my mind has changed. I have educational subreddits in my RSS feed as well as blogs and newspapers. Feedly is free to use but extra features are a paid premium. As you can see when I tried to add content from Twitter it wanted me to upgrade my account. Feedly Pro is $8 per month and Pro+ is $16 per month. Pro+ is required to follow Twitter handles, hashtags, or keyword searches. The upgrades also will remove sponsored content from your feed and allow you to go beyond the 100 source limit of the free Feedly account. 

Screenshot of Laura's Feedly feed

Screenshot of Feedly's navigation

Screenshot of Feedly's "Add Content" feature

Overall, I've been really happy with Feedly as an RSS feed and I have found myself checking my feed and getting some great information from a few particularly useful websites, like Free Technology for Teachers and EdTech Magazine. I look forward to continue to use Feedly, fine tune my content, and explore new websites!