I had a great experience during this course, and I learned a lot of useful information that will really benefit me as a future educator. I believe that my understanding of a PLN will benefit me during my professional development after this course because I now know what a PLN is, and how to grow and use one. The most important part for me in expanding my network is reaching out to people in order to connect and build relationships. This will provide me with supports I can use in my future career when needed. I believe that my final project group discussed a lot of different topics about PLNs throughout our assignment. We addressed how different social media platforms could be used to grow a network for different purposes, including growing a business and for personal use. I think that our final project can be relied on to begin learning about professional opportunities in regard to growing a learning network, but I also believe that other research should be done as well. There is so much that goes into building a presence on a social media platform that our project should not be solely relied upon.

Through this course, I believe that my PLN has expanded. Not just from the peers I have worked with, but also through the content and speakers I have listened to. Many of the guest speakers also provided different people or references on social media that they follow who inspire them or benefit them after connecting with that person. I would really like to look into some of their accounts to see what I could learn from them. At this point, I believe that my PLN has become slightly more professional, but I also think that my professional learning network will grow greatly in the future, as I progressed through my education towards becoming a teacher. As this happens, I will build connections with many people that will help me later. I believe using social media to help grow and develop my PLN is one of the best ways to do so. Right now, I use multiple different social media platforms, and I am interested in exploring others in order to find the one that I believe will work best for me to grow my future professional network on.

Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash