Online Communities and Personal Learning Networks

This is something I have just started to explore this past year after getting my GET certificate.  The more I think of it, this is something I should have been pursing professional much earlier.  It falls right in with the role of the librarian, to help others, answer questions and find information.  The only difference is you don't have someone standing right in front of you.  But this too is just an evolution, the library has evolved from beyond the 4 walls of its building to become a virtual space, so too should the librarian expand beyond the physical into the virtual world to help those that enter the space.  In doing so she/he will learn more than they would have just sitting behind a desk reading a book.

I am always looking for new ways to engage my students and make life easy (and interesting) for my teachers.  In reading through the articles posted in the Cool Tools assignments, I found that there are more ways to incorporate twitter into the classroom than I previously thought.  Two that particularly stood out to me are in the article "20 Interesting Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom," and they were, analyzing how social messages (tweets) and private thoughts differ and analyzing 5 ways tone can be conveyed in a tweet.  The only stumbling block I see is the district restrictions, no one in the district is allowed to access social media (not even teachers).  I had to beg to have Google+ turned on so I could complete my Google Educator Training Certificate.  I would love to be able to incorporate this type of PLN into my Library/Tech classes.  Students need to have experience with online communities that deal with aspects other than just their social life.

Since I was able to get Google+ turned on, this year my focus has been expanding my PLN through Google+.  Prior to this year, PLN were something I used for my personal life only.  I didn't even refer to them as PLN, they were social media, facebook, twitter.  And I certainly would not combine the two, and I still won't.  I am a big believe in my personal life, is my personal life and I will post what I want to post, but it was not until the fall that I realized how helpful this could actually be to my teaching and librarianship.  I was able to reach out to people who had issues similar to mine, get answers that I could use, but more importantly help others, which to me is my job.  This added a new facet to my library.  The resources available to me grew by leaps and bounds in a matter of minutes.

One of the issues I did find was when I joined these communities, I had a whole load of emails to go through.  To keep up with this became quite the job.  I did have to cut back on some of the community notices I was receiving, and I do find that I go to these boards less.  Even just receiving notifications doesn't get me to the boards.  There has to be a happy medium, but I just haven't found it yet.  That will be one of the goals that I continue to work toward.