HOW IS SOCIAL MEDIA BEING USED IN MY PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

DESCRIPTIVE
I am presently involved in social media in a limited way. I am on face book.  I belong to a few groups on there that are part of my professional networks. They include:
  • Mindlab November 2017 Tauranga groups.
  • Food and Nutrition teachers New Zealand.

I also follow a few pages that are relevant to my teaching practise such as NZQA so I hear about important announcements.
I find these all to be useful sources of information. I find out about things that I might not otherwise. I am not very interactive in most of these groups except the Mindlab group.

COMPARATIVE
What might I like to do differently?
It would be good to get more involved in the Food and Nutrition teachers New Zealand group. I have only recently been made aware of this group and joined it. I have observed that it only has a few people that contribute to it even though there are 169 members. Most of the posts are just sharing useful information in terms of articles and websites that relate to nutrition and some aspects that relate to our teaching practise.
 I would like to use this as a platform to come more connected with other teachers in this space and share some ideas about what we actually teach. One example would be that each year I teach a level three standard that requires you to analysis conflicting nutritional information. Each year the topic for this changes so you have to find new resources each year. I would like to use this as a platform to find out how other teachers approach this and share some ideas about the types of resources that could be useful for this year’s topic. This follows some of the themes shared in the connected educator’s video.  We as teachers can be less isolated in what we teach through using this platform more effectively.
Melhuish  (2013) highlights the limitations of some of these forms of social network sites if we stop using them because we think superficially they are not of use to us. I could very easily take this approach as so far I have not seen any links that I think I would like to click on, explore more or use in my teaching. I need to think beyond this and identify what I could do to make it more beneficial rather than stop using it.

CRITICAL REFLECTION
The implications for using social media in my own professional development is that I could become more connected with other teachers in different parts of New Zealand that are teaching the same Achievement Standards as myself. I can start to interact with them, rather than just being a passive observer of what other teachers put up on the Facebook feed. This would be beneficial to the way I access new teaching ideas.
This reflective process has helped to inform and change my perspective by thinking of ways this group can help me. Having been a member of the group for only a short while and observing what is being posted I was thinking that I might stop being a member. This has helped me to reconsider it and think of ways that I could make the network of teachers that a more powerful resource for myself.

REFERENCES
Source: Office of Ed Tech. (2013, Sep 18). Connected Educators. [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=216&v=K4Vd4JP_DB8
p. 36-44 in Chapter 3 of Melhuish, K.(2013). Online social networking and its impact on New Zealand educators’ professional learning. Master’s Thesis. The University of Waikato. Retrieved on 05 May, 2015.
 Whitaker, T., Zoul, J., & Casas, J. (2015). What connected educators do differently. New York, NY: Routledge.


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