Thursday, January 8, 2015

Thing 3 - Personal Learning Networks

As always, I found this "thing" very interesting and helpful. As a long-time Facebook user and a somewhat "seasoned" Twitter account holder, I was interested in learning more about how to use these tools in an educational setting. I have still not ventured into the land of Facebook for my school libraries, but HAVE had a Twitter account for about a year now, to which I post (tweet) links for interesting or helpful articles I come across.

I do struggle with determining my intended audience though - I'd like to have more students following me, and use Twitter to announce new books that arrive, or special contests, etc. but most of my followers are colleagues. I need to work on ways to make @MCSDlibrary more student-focused.

While completing "thing 3", I explored several of the links and articles that were recommended, and even tweeted some out to my followers, including:

"Facebook Guide for Educators" (which was favorited by my principal - yay!!)
"Does Facebook Really Have a Place in the Classroom?"
"20 Interesting Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom"

After that I thought I'd challenge myself by creating a Twitter widget to add the feed to my library websites. I used the link under option 3 to create the widget and attempted to put it on my library webpages. However, I could not add the HTML code on my own so am now waiting for my technology help desk to assist me with getting the widget on the site and working. I am hoping that this may attract more followers!