The Educator's PLN

I have recently joined The Educator’s PLN, a network for educators hosted on the customizable social networking platform Ning. As a new member exploring what the site has to offer, I am finding a lot of great content and potential here.

When I logged in and landed on the home page, I was immediately drawn to the Edchat page, where I found information for weekly Twitter chats about education. Not only that, but there are archives of transcripts from previous discussions. Extensive. For more discussion, there are forums. It seems like a good place to find interesting posts on a variety of topics. For more specific discussions, there are groups, which feature their own forums and comment section. Unfortunately, I am currently having a little difficulty finding currently active groups relative to my educational interests. There’s also a number of blogs users are posting directly on The Educator’s PLN, the advantages of which we’ve discussed a little bit before.

The section of the site I found most immediately attractive as a new member was the videos section.

It’s a great collection of videos submitted by users about anything related to education. I like to dig through the vastness of YouTube and such for useful material but it’s always difficult and time-consuming to find the good stuff. Using a social network as a way of curating videos we find useful as individuals is a great way to kind of filter out the less useful results when looking through content-hosting sites directly.

While the daily activity is not as abundant as some other groups found on more mainstream platforms, a social networking site dedicated entirely to educators has many perks, including less distracting unrelated content. I like the ability to connect and share accounts for other social networks in user profiles, offering an opportunity to expand our networks of knowledgeable professionals exponentially.