Creating and managing a PLN

Over the last two months I have created and used a PLN or Personal Learning Network. I accessed PLN through an RSS feed service called feedly, this gives me quick and organized access to to various blogs and news sources in one easy to access location. Furthermore I began to follow some educational Twitter feeds, and explore some Ning groups. The important bit of my PLN is the ease of access. I can read articles, watch videos, and follow links on my smartphone or tablet, and while on my home, office, or school computer. To start, I followed some national education and technology news sources such as NPR Ed., KPBS, and TED talks on education. I also found some smaller content creators and YouTube channels focusing on education, and using technology in education. I want to talk about my experiences in each of these three areas of my PLN; RSS feed, Twitter, and Ning.

For my RSS feeds I subscribed to a variety of education and educational technology blogs and news feeds. While I probably did not check my feedly as often as I could have, I used many of the interesting articles I found for blog posts over the last few months. I would often see articles in my email, or in passing but due to most of my schedule I found myself only skimming one or two articles a week. I noticed that some of the blogs I subscribed to were not much more than short blurbs about apps and were about as useful as a link to an App Store. It's important to vet the subscribed items in an RSS feed or else it can quickly get cluttered with useless repeat blurbs that are not any better than advertisements. On that note many of the news sites are also cluttered with ads and links that it can be difficult to find the article or information and often I found myself navigated away from what I wanted to read. However, accessing the articles on a mobile device I could use reader mode which removed the unnecessary clutter.

On Twitter, I followed many of the same blogs such as TED-Ed, KPBS News, and Smarter every day. As well as ED week, Kahn academy and MindShift, I would get Twitter notifications when they posted new articles or videos or if they were included in discussion topics. I stayed away from discussions, I found that  I either didn't have anything to say, or I was much more interested in the postings/videos/articles. I feel like Twitter could be a powerful tool for a teacher that can make sure their class is subscribed and then share assignments, links, videos and information to students, but that would require a different access than I had for this PLN. Through Twitter I found the group ”we are teachers” a Twitter feed dedicated to providing ideas inspiration and information for teachers. Through browsing their posts I feel like it would be a great resource to keep handy.

Finally on Ning groups, I just browsed around, I did not join any but looking through the groups suggested in class. I found that once I am in a position to use and access that type of information sharing on a daily basis, I would easily find a multitude of uses for sharing and collaborating with other educational professionals. Most importantly the way the Ning groups are set up with a fee does mean that the clutter of advertisements that I struggled with from the news sites did not exist.

reflecting on the overall experience of building a PLN, I found that while I may not have used it too much currently I definitely see my use growing as my work Habits shift over the coming years. finally, since I have already begun building my network, it will be there for me as my uses fore it grow.