Professional Personal Learning Networks

http://www.teachthought.com/social-media/8-ideas-10-guides-and-17-tools-for-a-better-professional-learning-network/

This article in Teach Thought (which I recommend you follow) provides an excellent list of tips and ideas to get started or develop your personal learning network. These inlcude

• Actively make ties: It’s not enough to just follow and read, you need to connect. Leave comments, reply to questions, and start your own conversations.
• Join Twitter chats: Educators can chat, collaborate, and connect through Twitter chats like #edchat and #edmeet.
• Share your lesson plans, presentations, and documents: Use services like Tumblr, Edublogs, or Facebook to share lesson plans with your learning network.
• Crowdsource ideas: Turn to your PLN to crowdsource ideas or perform social searches.
• Use Twitter resources to discover more people to follow: Check out following/follower lists, RTs, #followfriday suggestions, and Twitter lists of the people you admire to find even more great resources to add to your PLN.
• Discover new people to add to your network: Lots of educators use social media as a passive way to check out people they’d like to add to their personal learning networks. Analyze the quality of their posts, point of view, and signal to noise to decide if they’d make a good addition to your network.
• Start conversations: Use your social media accounts to ask questions and spark conversations that encourage new thinking.
• Find new blogs and resources to follow using social bookmarking: Social bookmarking services like Diigo and Delicious can help you not only find great blogs and resources, but also get your connected with other educators to add to your network.

The article also includes a list of resources. I was both surprised and thrilled to find that a presentation I had given with my colleague David Walker was included. This presentation was given at the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) Conference. 

Using social media to develop your own personal learning network from Sue Beckingham


Social Media has played a huge part in developing my own personal learning network. Some recommendations I would make would be to:

• Ensure you create a clear bio that says what your areas of interest are and include a link to your blog, LinkedIn profile or website.
• Upload a photograph of yourself. People find it harder to engage with an egghead or other default avatar.
• Don't be frightened to just listen to conversations in social media channels initially, but do go on to raise questions or respond ones raised.

Further information about getting started with social media can be found on my Social Media blog at http://socialmedia4us.wordpress.com/. I'd love to hear your comments on any of the posts on there.