Professional Learning Networks… gotta love them. I have joined multiple PLNs since becoming a teacher. As always, when I first join the PLN I am very active in both posting and responding to others in the network, but after a few months I get busy stop checking it as much and eventually I stop signing in all together. Thankfully I have found a solution to my deteriorating interest. Email and Google+. I have joined various communities on Google Plus and since I don’t ever go to the actual Google Plus site I opted to get emails whenever anyone posts in the communities that I am interested in. This is working great for my smaller moderately active communities, but I quickly learned that for some of my very large educational communities this was not a good option. I was getting as many as 30 emails a day from just one of the larger communities.
So how did I use my PLNs? I really used them mostly like an RSS feed to keep up on the latest in my field of interest. However, a few days ago I was asked by one of my teachers about 3D printing, all of our schools have at least one 3D printer, with carbon filament. I had no idea if they could print with carbon fiber filament and the manufactures website was of no help, so I turned to Google+. Within 10min I had multiple responses from people who had the same printer who had tried printing with carbon filament. It was awesome.
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