Using Social Media for Professional Personal Learning Networks

Thoughtless use of social media provides opportunities for career ending mistakes.  However, a focused effort to use social media for the purposes of amplifying your own personal learning network can provide educators, their students, and staff, with tremendous opportunities for  personal growth.

The following lists three possible level of professional social media engagement, each with its own personal learning benefits and risks:

• Consumers
  • Gather information for your personal learning network
  • For example, consumers look at photographs, visit museums, and watch films
  • Risk: Low
  • Benefit:  Exposure to new information, data, and trends
• Curators
  • Share the information with others
  • For example, curators collect art, pictures, and movies while categorizing, sharing, and indexing their collections
  • Risk: Medium
  • Benefit: Development of virtual and real world networks of experts, colleagues, and followers
• Producers
  • Create new information
  • For example, producers own cameras and paintbrushes, work in design studios, and create for the curators and consumers.
  • Risk: High
  • Benefit: Change current practice and thought patterns, establish new trends, impact legislative and curriculum policy

Social Media tools for each level of engagement:

Consumers 

• Twitter (easiest to use and navigate)
• Linkedin