The first level of pull is access. According to book, The Power of Pull (John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison), “access involves the ability to find, learn about and connect with resources (people, products, and knowledge) on an as-needed basis to address unanticipated needs.”

It was the Flat Classroom project last fall that first introduced me to RSS readers as part of my professional learning network.  I promptly set up iGoogle as my homepage and followed many of the great educational sites/players – edutopia, Ted talks, Steve Hargadon and  David Warlick. Every time I took a look, there was something interesting or new happening and many new leads to follow.

I have since started following some fine educators on Twitter. Thomas Ro from our HWDSB 21st Century Fluencies committee gave me some tips on how to track tweets from these sources using Tweet Deck. This organizes all of your tweets according to your parameters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now the challenge is not to get too distracted with all of the interesting information coming at 140 characters! I also have the echofon plugin for my browser that keeps me informed immediately of any new tweets when Tweet Deck isn’t running. Then there is the “newspaper” (paper.li) that formats all the tweets I follow (and send) in a newspaper format – definitely easy to read. I have found some very useful links and tips from tweets and this takes far less time that reading blog posts.