Blog Post 7: Professional Learning Network

Throughout this class, we have discovered many outlets to connect to the professional world via social media and websites. We have looked at Twitter, RSS fields, and Affinity Groups. The affinity group which I have joined was the NAAE or the National Association of Agricultural Educators. Reading through the topic posts, different concerns and needs are very unique compared to most if not all subject matters. There are topics about curriculum,  FFA activities and shared power points. These are real life situations and experiences that an agricultural educator experiences such as games going wrong and questions on labs and curriculum. The RSS feeds are an excellent source for news as well as my affinity group. I can briefly view over 30 articles with a very short amount of reading. It connects the NAAE with other science news sites where i can pull information of provide relevant topics for the days lesson. In the case of twitter, I do not even  usually use it in my everyday life. I have seen both sides of the argument from the class and I do not think I would use it unless it is a fun creative lab or response from a lecture where they have to create hashtags or utilizes the restriction of one hundred characters or less to generate a response. Overall the experience that I have gained from this assignment has been to reflect and I have seen the various tools  that as an educator, I can use in order to add relevant information or even share my experience with the other educators in my field.