Chapter Six Review

After reading chapter six of, "The Connected Educator," I have grasped an understanding on how people in their working fields create, set roles, communicate, and share valuable ideas and lessons while using networks.   The world we live in today, is growing very fast and is becoming more technology based.  Obtaining knowledge, learning, and applying ideas can all be found and managed within virtual networks.  Personal learning networks allows you make deeper connections and relationships with people all around the world that are in the same working field as you are.  Networks are where you can find ideas and information and bring that following information back to your work place and share what you have learned.  This allows the work place to grow and be open minded by accepting new thoughts and ideas and enforcing them.  However, after obtaining certain ideas from various networks, you are allowed to alter those thoughts and ideas.

Networking can be very overwhelming at first, the author states.  Questions can start to form: How many people should I follow?  Am I interested in what this person is sharing?  Are these ideas inspiring me and can I bring them back to my community?  People starting to network need to remember this, you have to see yourself as a learner first and a teacher second.  It is okay to not be a leader in the networking field.  It is acceptable to just sit back and try to absorb, learn, and apply as much information you can and bring it back to your community.  I have learned that there are four roles you can obtain while networking based on your participation.  The first one is linking: where a person can join a network and visit periodically.  The second role is, lurking: where a person does not share their own thoughts and ideas, however they like to learn from others.  The third is, learning: this person brings something to the virtual network and take away information.  The last is, leading: this is where the individual puts enormous amount of time into their community.

Overall, after reading this chapter made me realize how important it is to network yourself.  Becoming a future educator, I now see how important it is to begin to network yourself early on in your career.  Over this past summer, I have started to network myself on the social media, Instagram.  (Yes, I know, it might sound silly).  On Instagram, I find many different educators who share new ideas, lessons, and concerns on their social media.  Most of the educators that I follow will post a little picture explaining a new concept or lesson, but will post a link to their blog containing their thoughts, ideas, comments and concerns.  I hope as time goes on during this semester, I can learn how to network myself professionally and start to comment and post my ideas.  Becoming an educator, I see how networking can not only help myself as an individual, but my co-teachers.