Professional growth is not only about finding like minded people. Our professional learning networks can be built in this way, adding people from similar backgrounds or roles to our Twitter network. But that might just confirm the bias we already have.
I see great value in the exposure to alternative thinking. We gain access to perspectives that differ from our own and that may be in obvious opposition. Our social learning networks provide easy access to thinking and development from beyond the domain of education. I have deliberately built connections with practitioners in a wide variety of fields not just education.
Yes, your professional learning network should help you tap into the expertise and ideas of fellow educators. But I think the real value emerges as your network matures and you build connections far beyond the walled garden of education.
These connections challenge us to think critically about our work and what we think we know. The dissonance instigated by diversity of thought and alternative viewpoints can be a springboard to empathy.
When you join Twitter it can seem a strange little place, with its own rules and secret ways. Having helped many people make a start I wanted to share some of the key things to help you early on so you can tap into the huge potential a Twitter network has. Here are my 10 steps:
1) Profile
This is about setting out your stall and saying to the world what you are about. Personally, I look for involvement with education in some form or reference to other stuff I am interested in.
Make sure that your profile, including a picture, is well updated as it helps others who might be looking to connect with you decide to follow you or not. Add a link to your blog, if you have one, so we can read a little more about you.
2) Jump IN!
Profile sorted, now just get started. Most people will look at your profile alongside what you have tweeted about recently. Write about how your lessons have gone, a great website you have used today (add the link, everyone loves looking at new web resources), a good digital camera you have in school, problems with your network, revelations from your pupils. Anything really, just make a start!
3) Follow people
For me Twitter is all about making connections with fellow, often like-minded, professionals, so find someone you know or whose blog you may have enjoyed reading for a while and explore who they follow and who follows them.
Then explore someone else’s follower list etc. When you look at someone’s Twitter profile you will be able to see the people they follow and those who follow them, with a few clicks your network will grow.
4) Piggyback
Give your network a kickstart by asking someone with a whole heap of followers to put in a good word for you. Piggybacking in this way will open up more networks for you to explore and teachers to follow. Just be sure to follow back those that have followed you if you are happy to.
5) Reply
Along with putting the word out about yourself, engage with people directly by replying (@ before their username) and direct messaging (D before their username – private). If you can help or offer advice of your own then do so where you can. You might be asking for help in the future.
6) Where else?
Remember that Twitter is just one part of a broad online network – make sure you spend time exploring other tools such as blogs (WordPress and Posterous) Google Plus, Plurk etc You will see that these social networks overlap, you will see different types of people and conversations taking place. All good.
7) Hashtags
These are little tags we use on Twitter to label different tweets. By adding a hashtag that update is added to a conversation that may be running in real time like #ukedchat or just a topic based tag that is more of a collection of tweets like #classblogs.
By using these labels our tweets will be seen by more people, even if our network is small. If I am interested in science and I search on Twitter for #science I will see all of the tweets labelled with that tag. I may or may not have those people in my network but I will see their updates.
Hashtags are a way to organise and filter conversations on Twitter and also a good way to discover interesting people to follow.
8) Blog links
Explore the blog links people share on their Twitter profiles and see what these people say about their work in more than 140 characters. Also, look out for Twitter badges and widgets on blogs you read regularly. They will normally appear in the sidebar saying “follow me” and will lead you to their Twitter account.
I think it is equally interesting to see how eloquent bloggers distil their thoughts to 140 characters as it is the other way around. If you have a blog you should think about adding links on your Twitter profile.
9) Worry Less
Once things are up and running and you have followed a whole bunch of people you may start to worry about what you are missing. Well, don’t! Many people have described reading Twitter updates like trying to drink from a fire hydrant!
Sometimes it can feel like that, you will no doubt adapt and adjust the ways you interact with Twitter as you continue to use it. I see it as a constant stream or flow of information+ideas which I interact with when I am there. When I turn away… c’est la vie.
10) Persevere
In the early days of Twitter use it can be very quiet, few replies, not much going on in terms of conversation. Do not be discouraged – try to persevere and stick it out and keep using it, soon enough there will be a “tipping point” when the connections you have make reap a bountiful information harvest.
Twitter is whatever you want it to be – it is a great place to start building a Personal Learning Network but not the only place. It is your personal choice how and if you use it.
Your profile is key as it sets your stall out clearly from the outset, especially if this is to be a professional network. I hope you have enjoyed exploring some of these ideas and they help you make a start!
Having spent a little bit of time using the Google+ Project I thought I would share some initial thoughts and reactions.
From the very beginning it is all about people, as always with these new network tools it is about adding people into your space to enjoy and share it with. I was immediately impressed with the Circles feature which helps you organise people into different groups. The user interface is really nice and it was easy to grab people and drop them into the right Circle for them.
You can create lots of different circles and name them whatever you like. Once you are using and sharing if there is someone who either adds you to their Circle or you see their name mentioned, all you have to do is roll over their name, then the Circles icon and then tick which they belong to in the pop up window – really easy.
Within Google Apps for Edu I can see each class having a specific Circle with which you can share content.
As many people have said, this level of organisation is much more like real life as we have distinct and sometimes overlapping connections with people. What is currently missing seems to be (amongst other things):
to share a whole Circle with others
to add inner circles to a group – say for groups within a class
build on other social media groups, LinkedIn or Twitter lists
This compartmentalised approach to our social networking behaviour is very much at the core of what the Google+ Project seem to be developing. When you look to share any type of content you can be very refined about who you share it with. As Vincent Mo from Google explains:
On Google+, anyone can add me to their circles, and they never see more than what I share with them. It’s as easy as not adding them to a circle. That means people can add me all they want. If I post something private, I’ll only post it to a circle, and they won’t see it. Go ahead. Add me. I don’t care.
So the focus is on the creation of Circles of connections which then allows you to dictate who you share content with. Vincent Mo says that Google+ is “built around targeted sharing”. Seems obvious – and Google have executed these crucial elements really well.
Even if you have not had the chance to use Google+ I would be interested to hear your thoughts regarding the Circles style of organisation and how it differs to what we are used to.
The Curriculum Catalyst is about the online education community coming together to produce practical resources that we can all use to support curriculum development.
At the end of last weekend the Catalyst had over 280 topic ideas for the curriculum and over 70 people had voted more that 3000 times for a top topic. It turned out to be SEALIFE and since then I have created an open Google Document to collate our ideas for the topic. (Stage 2)
The document already has over 50 crowd-sourced sealife ideas (thanks for your help so far) for teaching and learning including:
Subject specific lesson activities
Books to support the Sealife topic
Web based resources
Details of the Ocean layer in Google Earth
Nintendo Wii games that can be used
Possibilities for places to visit in the UK
DVD titles
I hope that it proves useful in sparking some ideas for you and your staff. Please consider adding a short idea to the document to continue developing it. Don’t forget to just explore the 280+ topic ideas themselves (and vote), maybe there is something there you haven’t thought of.
After a week, so this Sunday, I will repeat the process for the next highest voted topic and create a new ideas document to work on. Currently “Imaginary Creatures” is in the lead. All of the weekly docs will be linked from my blog’s Curriculum Catalyst page.
After some feedback and comments from Ben Barton and Sarah Brownsword on my previous post, I have begun to see another side to the third idea I outlined. The web application I proposed would provide teachers the opportunity to find resources, connections and ideas all in one place – from one search query.
Vortex by phill.d
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
However it occurred to me that although there are existing tools that perhaps do these things, they are just diluting the process. Another web application doing this will just multiply this further, resources and people will be in another place to join and search – spreading the network even more thinly.
Maybe I was coming at this from the wrong angle. The emphasis should be on teachers developing network capabilities that allow them to tap into and find all of this and not a tool or system that does it all for you.
I consider the journey to where my network is now to be just as important as anything I gain from it. The experience of virtually meeting and connecting with literally thousands of educators from around the world has been amazing – shortcutting to a prefabricated, ready-made, network denies people that opportunity.
Someone mentioned that this type of web tool (content management and social networking combined) is a sort of “holy grail” – but on reflection I think that the real treasure is a network that invariably yields value for the user in construction as well as in use.
I am just jealous of all of those trainee teachers who are establishing their networks whilst they are training. They are tapping into the insights from working teachers and no doubt benefitting from it in their own practice. Just imagine what their network capabilities will be like when they are 3 years or 5 years into teaching.
Every teacher training course in the world should encourage and teach students to build a network to support them professionally.
I am convinced. It is not a case of finding a single tool, system or platform that seeks out content and connects teachers – it should be down to us to make the journey to those different destinations ourselves and learn as much as we can along the way.
