Hello! As you can see by the title of my blog post (which is set to the tune of "My Favorite Things" from the Sound of Music, if you're wondering), today we're discussing PLN's and how I use them. I am on many social media networking sites (some of which you can find links to on this website), including but not limited to: Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, TikTok and LinkedIn. Today, I'm going to talk about my experience following career individuals in the field of education on LinkedIn and TikTok, and what I gathered from the experience.
To find teachers on these websites, I first went to LinkedIn. Simply, I clicked on the search bar within the website and searched for "teachers". I scanned through the results and eventually found a few professionals I wanted to follow. As for TikTok, I did something very similar and searched for teachers in the in-app search bar. I scrolled through the results of the search and found a few teachers I wanted to follow.
When it comes to what I learned from these individuals, one TikTok teacher stressed the importance of taking breaks in the classroom, both for the success of your students' learning and for the stress management of yourself as an educator. They argued that breaks are integral to the learning process, and that teachers cannot physically give one hundred and ten percent all of the time without tiring. Another thing I learned on Tiktok was that one teacher advocated for using online review games like Kahoot and Quizlet Live in the classroom. On LinkedIn, one career professional posted about developing multicultural lesson plans, and I learned that you should keep in mind every culture when developing lesson plans.
When it comes to continuing to expand my professional network, I think that I would love to continue using LinkedIn as it's such a strong contender for professional networking. I would try to connect with career professionals who visit Purdue, as well as find more teachers in the digital space on LinkedIn. However, I will not discredit the networking potential of apps like Instagram and TikTok. So in general, I will continue following career professionals and reading the posts of these esteemed individuals.
That's all! Thanks for reading.
- Zack
