Digital Immersion (Term 3, Week 4)

Today we are discussing developing our own PLN (Professional Learning Network).

As we are digital teachers in a digital world, so it makes sense to connect digitally through a PLN.

We had a Google Hangout with James Hopkins, who is an educator in one of the Manaiakalani outreach clusters. He talked us through how he got involved in Twitter, its benefits etc etc.

One of the main ideas he put across was...

"You need to be who you are going to be, regardless of the platform you are on" - James Hopkins

Meaning.. regardless if you keep your Facebook private and your Twitter professional, you are the same person on both so need to have some consistencies. Having an actual picture of yourself is also a very important thing to have on all your social platforms, as it makes you 'real' and people can actually connect with the real you, rather than a picture of a beach or your newborn baby.

Then we had a Twitter chat #MDTAchat for almost two hours. We were given questions by Anne and we had to respond to these. 

You can read the thread here. 

(Note the Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 at the beginning of the Tweets to see which ones we are responding to)

Reflection

As I am very new to the Twittersphere, and keep my Facebook private (free of kids parents, etc), I think I have made a good start to building my PLN. I share my blog posts onto Google+, and now on Twitter. One thing I need to work on in the future is making more of an effort to comment/repost/retweet other people to build up those relationships.