Personal Reflection

PLN building was a very interesting process. I never considered using social media to develop my professional practice, but it has become a valuable resource for me over the past few months. I used Twitter, Feedly, and GoodReads for the bulk of my PLN building.

Feedly is now the first app I open in the morning. Everyday I browse the blog posts and read articles. Before this semester I had never even heard of Feedly, and now 3 months later I am following 21 blogs. It has been an incredibly easy way of keeping track of the blogs that I was already following while discovering new blogs with related content.

GoodReads has become an incredible resource for me. Before this semester I simply used it to track the books that I have read or am currently reading and to get recommendations from like-minded readers. Now I use it to follow authors and their blogs, which are sometimes included in their profiles.

Before enrolling in graduate school I never thought I would use social media for professional development. It did not seem like an appropriate medium for making professional connections. How wrong I was! Twitter has led me to find many valuable resources, from professionals and organizations in the field to articles with tips and tricks for using the latest ed-tech. I don’t post my own tweets very regularly, I am still trying to emerge from my Twitter turtle shell, but I do follow many accounts, and I retweet and/or like interesting and relevant articles and tweets the accounts and hashtags I follow using Tweetdeck.

I used Twitter analytics for my analysis, and used the data to create the chart above. My growth was somewhat slow and erratic, due to my sporadic posts.