 Hi, this is Angela McDermott with Social Tools for Continuous Professional Learning. Are you missing opportunities to learn and improve? If you are not already using Social Tools as learning tools, I'm sorry to say you are missing opportunities to find timely resources and to have professional discussions. Please allow me to explain. When you work for an educational organization, a school, a district, a college, the organization provides training, typically in-house or within the system that I call staff development. This is the training that the organization believes all of the employees need in order to work well and to improve in accordance with the institution's goals. While this training is important and provides a foundation for consistency in daily operations, it rarely addresses the individual learning needs of its employees. In addition to staff development, these organizations also offer professional learning which is designed to help teachers and administrators grow and improve their craft. If your learning needs are similar to large groups of others in your organization, it is likely that some of the sessions offered are helpful and address your needs. If you are in a specialized field or content area that few teach, it is less likely that your organization can provide all the learning you need. If you are like me, attending conferences once a year does not provide enough learning. That is why I turned to social media tools. They allow me to learn from and with a wide variety of people as often as I wish. These tools help me increase the amount of professional learning I engage in and tip my learning scale toward the type of learning I enjoy. They even improve my face-to-face conference learning. In fact, it was at a face-to-face conference that I learned the reason that I should start using social media tools. Several years ago I was at an education technology conference. I was upset that I could not attend some sessions because they were scheduled at the same time as other sessions that I needed to attend. I wished that I had a friend attending the conference who could attend the sessions that I could not and then share the information. Then I realized that that was what people who were using Twitter were doing. People were sharing through Twitter the things they learned in different conference sessions. I realized that I was missing out and not learning all that I could. Instead of having one or two friends at a conference, I could have hundreds of friends and collectively the conversations we had could increase the amount of learning and the benefit we all received from the conference. And that is the moment that this introvert became interested in learning to use social media. I know most people think that a person who talks about using social tools for learning also uses or used social tools personally. That is not the case for me. People also think that people who like technology use social media. But that was not the case for me. If you are not a social media type, don't worry. You can still use these tools for learning. To get started, I recommend that you create accounts that are separate from your personal accounts. Please, please, please include a photo of yourself in the profile. In Twitter, the new accounts start with an egg profile image. To other users, the egg indicates that you are new or a fake user. People do not typically trust Twitter accounts with an egg for the profile image. In other social media, a lack of a photo makes one seem less trustworthy. In addition to an image, a brief profile is also helpful to establish yourself as someone genuinely interested in learning and participating in groups. Once you have your accounts, it is time to find your groups. These could be around specific topics, content, or grade levels. In using LinkedIn, Google Plus, or Edmodo, educators join groups. Since this is the easiest social learning for many, I will start with these. Along with email and storage in Google Drive, a Google account gives you the option to join Google Plus and the Google Plus communities. After logging into Google Plus, you may click on the Google Plus menu to view the icon for communities. This will bring you to the communities homepage, which will give you a sample of the types of public communities available to join. You may choose to enter a community or search for a topic that may not be represented on the main screen using the search bar at the top of the page. There are a variety of communities that exist. Some are regional educational communities like the Wisconsin educators, who have a Google community for sharing resources and having discussions. Others are national or international groups that have common interests. I have listed some of the more popular groups to check out. One nice feature of using Google communities is the ability to use Google hangouts to have live synchronous discussions with group members. Although many people have created professional profiles in LinkedIn and they've connected to their colleagues and their former colleagues, they don't always realize that there is a section of LinkedIn for groups. To find LinkedIn groups, select Interest from the main menu and then select Groups. Once there, you will see a listing of the groups that have remained public and that you may apply for membership in. A few years ago, I learned a great deal from participating in a group that was formed around an interest in BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device. This is also called BYOT, Bring Your Own Technology. This group, although quiet at the moment, in its prime was a place that I learned about the ways Bring Your Own Device policies were being implemented around the country and the world. I was able to learn from others and answer questions people had about implementing Bring Your Own Device. Out of all the groups I've joined and participated in, this was the group from which I learned the most. This was probably due to my own high interest and consistent participation. I have found that the more you stay, the more you take away when you're in the right group. EdMoto is a tool that is used by many schools and districts to provide an online learning community for teachers. It has been easy for many to use due to its similarity to Facebook. If you have an account with a school district's EdMoto group, you can also join groups beyond the district or school. EdMoto has plenty of tools to help you learn to use EdMoto that are free on their website. From my own personal experience, EdMoto has been a great way for teachers to share teacher-created resources and ask group members questions. With any of these groups, I suggest that you first browse and read a great deal before you start participating. Look to understand the group norms. Use attempt to share new resources or ideas and be careful not to repeat what has been recently shared by other group members. By reading through the discussions, you can determine if you have something new to contribute or a new question to propose for discussion. Unlike the previous social media tools, when using Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram, there are not groups to join. Instead, educators find people or organizations to follow. If you're not following others in these social tools, your content stream might not be overly helpful. Although it is not often included in discussions about learning through social media, I enjoy learning information from many of the groups and people I follow on Instagram. I have included a few of my favorites here. People who should definitely consider using Instagram for professional learning include artists and photographers. They could easily use the platform to highlight their work and to have discussions concerning the images they share. Though many schools have not yet caught on, I believe that Instagram is a better social media tool than Twitter for schools. This is because Instagram does not have a character limit and because students and parents alike enjoy seeing images. There are a few art teachers who have started using Instagram to showcase student work. I have found many ways to use Instagram content in the classroom and have occasionally used it to share resources and information from conferences. If you're looking for teachers to follow on Pinterest, look no further than teachers on Pinterest. As I've used a variety of social media tools, I've noticed that no matter which tool I choose, I often encounter the same people. And sometimes, well, more than sometimes, I see that they are publishing the same content across the different social media platforms. Where will you choose to learn and which tools will you use? Twitter remains one of my personal favorites. This is due in large part to Twitter chats. Many are amazed to learn how many groups there are. An excellent website for finding the times and hashtags for the chats is the Education Chat site. As you may have noticed in the last slide, Twitter is organized by hashtags. I have included many of the popular hashtags here. Please take a moment to review the slide and see if there is a group that would interest you. My favorite hashtag is EdTech for Education Technology. Although it is possible to read and post tweets from Twitter.com, many people also use tweetdeck.twitter.com. This is particularly true of people who are participating in or moderating Twitter chats. If you are looking for a great Twitter chat, I highly recommend Texas EduChat. You can find the archives and a list of the upcoming chats on their website at txeduchat. Their chats are every Sunday at 8 p.m. central time. Remember if you cannot make the chat, visit the archive. Another great feature of their site is that they have a video that Vicki Davis, the Cool Cat teacher, created to help people learn to participate in Twitter chats. Although I really like Twitter, I will admit that it is often the most challenging social tool for people to use. I recommend that you read a guide like the one I created a few years ago and offered for free or start with a site like Kathy Schrock's Twitter for Teacher's Page. Once you have your Twitter account and are armed with a little knowledge, head over to Texas EduChat and join in the discussion or just read and learn. Then find other hashtags, chat times, and, of course, continue learning. There are many times that I find interesting resources while using social media. Two of the tools I regularly use to collect them are shown here. Deego is a bookmarking site and more. I use it to create groups, view the links others are saving, automatically save items I favorite or star in Twitter, and to send tweets about the resources I find on the internet from my Deagleit toolbar. Flipboard is a relatively new social tool. With an account, users may create magazines full of curated items and then share their magazines with others. I flip news items, videos, and websites into my Flipboard magazines and have found them to be a great way to organize my resources. Beyond personal uses, Deego and Flipboard allow people to collaborate and curate resource collections together. An interesting feature of Deego that I touched on earlier is the hot bookmarks section of the site. This section may be found by selecting Discover from the menu bar and Community from the drop-down menu. In this particular screenshot, we see that 39 people bookmarked the Tech Insider post concerning the most innovative schools in the world and 61 people bookmarked the Atlantic piece about playtime in Finland. When I want to see what is trending or when I want to find better resources than the ones I have found through typical Google searches, I visit this page. The right side column of the page has a search community feature which allows me to search for specific content in the saved or curated bookmarks of other users. In addition to the resource, I can see the tags that others have given the websites when they bookmarked them. If you are looking to collect information from many social media tools, nothing beats Storify. To conduct these types of searches, Storify does require that you have social media accounts and that you link them. Once the search is conducted and the posts are collected, they may be arranged to tell stories that are easy to share. I often group Twitter posts in Storify and send them to non-Twitter users to read. This way, I can place the post in a typical reading format. The process also allows me to weed out the superfluous content. While I'm discussing sharing with others, I must mention that I created a small newsletter to accompany this presentation. The link to it is at the top of the slide. I hope you've learned a few ways to use social media to extend your learning and that I've inspired you to join in some of the professional conversations taking place on the web. I look forward to seeing you online, learning and sharing.