Three steps to get the best out of your PLN
Reading, writing and sharing
A personal (or professional) learning network is an essential for a life long learner. At least, that’s what Bandura concluded in his ‘social learning theory’ — we learn by interacting with others.
Simply put, to stay fresh in our professional lives, we need to keep on reading read and contributing into our learning community. That said, as teachers we process so much information every day that it can be challenging to keep all that we’re learning in our digital lives organised.
In fact, if I’m not careful I find that my PLN can add to stress and dissonance to an already full mind! So here’s four quick steps I take to manage my daily digital learning for maximum effectiveness and enjoyment.
Step 1: Read with Flipboard
Step one is all about reading. I usually start with Flipboard (and sometimes Feedly) because I can scan a lot of quite quickly. (But when I’m reading books for specific content I tend to use Blinkist and Kindle).
Flipboard is a “magazine” app which displays my Facebook and Twitter feeds brilliantly. It’s really easy to turn through the pages and dig deeper into articles of interest. Although Flipboard did take me a while to get the hang of, once all set up with your accounts and keywords, it’s a beautiful way to read especially on an iPad.
(I also like to read my Medium homepage, but I prefer to think about Medium as a ‘writing’ app as I’ll explain a little later).
When I’m reading I like to curate what’s valuable to me. A great way of doing this is to intentionally save the standout articles for future reference or sharing (step 3). Again, Flipboard is great for this by ‘flipping stories’ into magazines.
Having said this, I find that Pocket is possibly the best app for this is. The app is aptly named as it serves as a digital ‘pocket’ where you can save your articles and links too (quite similar to Safari’s reading list).
Step 2: Write with Medium
Once I’ve read, I like to write down what I’ve learned. This is because I find that writing clarifies what I read by giving me an opportunity to distil or synthesise the content I’ve processed. So I either draw diagrams in Notes (on my iPad) or write about what I’m reading in Medium.
Having said that, I don’t feel the need to publish everything I write, but when I feel like what I’ve written could be helpful to others, I like to press the publish button.
Of course there are many other creative ways to transform great reading into helpful digital assets: mindmaps on Mindnode, graphics on Canva or videos on YouTube to mention a few.
Step 3: Share with Twitter
To complete the learning cycle, it’s really important to ‘pay it forward’ = sharing what you’ve learned with your network. I find that one of the best places to share what I’ve written or created is on Twitter. It just seems that teachers hang out on Twitter?
Having said this, there are great Facebook groups, Pinterest accounts and other online platforms (we use Schoology) to share.
In conclusion, sharing is the pinnacle of modern learning because you are contributing to the knowledge base. And remember — what you think is obvious, others think is gold!
