I’ve always heard of people “networking” or “making connections” to further or help their career. I just never thought I would need to be one of those people! After doing some reading on the subject, I have discovered that Personal Learning Networks help your career and are just a smart idea!
Teaching is probably one of the careers that can benefit the most from a PLN. I didn’t realize it, but I’ve been working on mine for over a year now! I’ve been lucky enough to go to several different workshops and seminars this year where I have met people that have helped me learn and grow. These people have become Facebook friends, email companions, and Pinterest followees. (I’m not sure if that’s what you call the people you follow or not, but it sounds fun!)
Twitter, as I am learning, is a wonderful place to learn new information and get additional ideas or help from some of the top educators out there! This is a bit of a challenge for me because I am still rather new to Twitter and I’m not sure how to find credible people to follow. I must be searching incorrectly because I put in “high school English” and the first feed that popped up was completely in Spanish and based in Spain. Hmm… I decided to Google my inquiry instead and I think it worked! I found a blog that has a list of names and explanations that are helpful! Feel free to check it out for yourself if you’re also having difficulties or are looking for more inspiration! So far I have added a few, but I will continue to search for great experts to follow! Here is another list of educational feeds that looks interesting as well!
As I have mentioned, Pinterest is one of my favorite things in the world. If you are also on it, feel free to check out my teaching pages: Here and here for English ideas, and here for general ideas. I’m not the best at following people or pages, but I will work on that as well! I love just searching something specific I have in mind or going to the education feed and browsing! I just found a page to follow specifically for High School ELA teachers! Yay!
I’m truly discovering the power of technology and everything we have at our fingertips that can truly help us continually improve ourselves for our students! I’m excited that I am learning these things early in my career so I can quickly improve myself to be the best teacher for my kiddos that I can be!
Steps to do to work on my PLN: Search, find, follow on Twitter, blogs, and Pinterest. Repeat!
Here is one tweet that I found that will be helpful for myself!
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>A little late, but wanted to share our literary device posters <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/languagearts?src=hash”>#languagearts</a> <a href=”https://t.co/uK7qch0WKp”>pic.twitter.com/uK7qch0WKp</a></p>— Mrs. Cillis (@angelica_cillis) <a href=”https://twitter.com/angelica_cillis/status/876901178487037952″>June 19, 2017</a></blockquote> //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Tiff's Tid Bits 
I realized too, that I have a PLN started, yea us! Maybe it’s partly human nature to reach out to people and find resources to excel. Thanks for all of the links, and I’m going to learn to make word links when I embed next time. 😉
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I think you’re right! We are social creatures 🙂 You’re welcome! The links are really easy! Highlight the word you want and then click the chain looking image in the tool bar. This will pop up a spot for you to put in the url from the page you want to link it to!
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I like that you talk about Pinterest and its different uses. PLN can be very influential to the career, what are some ways teachers use PLN?
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We use our PLNs for several things! I have people for help concerning Speech and One-Act, standards, curriculum alignment, and countless people for ideas! I’m friends with many other teachers on Facebook and there we can share funny memes, videos, etc that make us laugh and brighten our day. It’s always nice to hear of someone going through something similar or a wonderful victory story!
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