Feedly and Building a Personal Learning Network

For week three’s class, we focused on a number of different apps and programs that will help us build our personal learning network (PLN).  The first program we went over was Twitter.  I have used Twitter in the past and had an account when I was in high school so I feel comfortable in navigating Twitter.  The other two programs we went over were Feedly and TweetDeck.  Before this week, I had not heard of or used either of these programs, but they seem easy enough to use.  Feedly is also the focus of this week’s blog post.

Feedly is an RRS reader that allows you to bring in articles from all over the internet that are related to topics that you choose.  The first thing I did when I joined Feedly was create my categories.  I made three in total: Education and Etech, Science and Technology, and Social Studies.  I created these categories specifically because the first one is relevant to this course and the other two are the areas I am focusing on in university and the subjects I plan on teaching. 

After creating my categories, I began looking for sources to follow by searching keywords.  And to be honest, I really did not put much thought into adding sources.  I just started adding a bunch of sources that seemed relevant to my categories.  As of right now, I have 21 total sources, and I have no idea if this is too much or too little right now, but this should become clearer as the semester goes on and I get more comfortable with the program. 

Two sources that I will likely pay particular attention to this semester is the New York Times section on education and the NRP Education section.  These sources focus on all things education.  With coronavirus and black history month being the most relevant topics this month, a majority of the articles I have come across from these sources have been about anti-oppressive education and the challenge of COVID-19 and schools.  One downside of these sources is that they are largely focused on education in the United States.  I would like to find sites that are similar to these but with a focus on education in Canada.  If anyone has any recommendations let me know!