Educational Networking

I’ve talked about this before, but let’s look at it again. Is your network working? Have you expanded to a point that you are learning and sharing with others what you learn on a day-to-day basis?

For those I’ve already lost, let’s back up and look at what personal networking is all about. Networking comes from connecting and following others on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and many others. I have two Facebook accounts that I’ve set up. One is for personal and the other is professional. The personal one is used for connecting to friends and family and seeing what they are doing in their lives. What I want to focus on is my professional Facebook page.

It is here that I connect to those that are in my profession as an educator and instructional technologist. On this account I can post many videos and blogs that I find on the Internet dealing with my profession. Likewise, my friends are doing the same things. From this, there is always so much to learn when you have many eyes scouring the Internet for news about educational change and what’s going on. Sure, I still find out what is going on in their lives, and that’s great, but it also helps me grow as a professional from the many things they post about our profession.

Also, as individualized learning keeps growing, we need to teach our students how to build their own learning network. We need to show them that learning can be fun by connecting to things that are of interest to them. The Internet opens the world to everyone.

Watch this short YouTube video on this subject.




I hope this challenges you to get more connected as a professional. You’ll be glad you did.