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Online Professional Learning Networks for Music Educators


By: Andrew Zweibel


In today’s world, Music Educators are extremely secluded. Many music educators are the only music teach- ers at their school, and if they are lucky enough to have someone else teaching music with them, they are still likely the only person who teaches their specific subject area within music. This fact, coupled with the increasing cost of travel to conferences and decreasing effectiveness of district-mandated in-service semi- nars to music teachers, makes professional development in the field of Music Education extremely difficult.


How, then, can music teachers find ways to continue to learn, share ideas, and find answers to questions that will help them better educate their students? Professional Learning Networks (PLN’s) are online com- munities based around the concept that connecting a large number of music educators across the globe will foster conversations and collaborations that lead to around-the-clock professional development. PLN’s come in many forms, but two specific uses of Social Media for development of a PLN are especially worthwhile for music educators to invest their time in:


#MusEdChat Twitter Chats Many have discounted Twitter as a worthwhile Social Media endeavor, citing that nobody cares what any given user ate for breakfast this week. While it is certainly true that ninety-eight percent of the world’s population couldn’t care less about any- one else’s cereal, Twitter does have an unbelievable potential for around-the-clock professional development for music edu- cators. Before diving into the ways this works, it is important to understand some of the basic twitter lingo: ●Tweet: This is Twitter’s official term for a Twitter update. It can be no longer than 140 characters in length.


●Follow: This is similar to “friendship” on Facebook, how- ever on Twitter, the person being followed does not have to accept a follow request. Anyone can fol- low anyone else simply by clicking “Follow” on their profile. All tweets from users that a user follows show up in the “timeline.”


●Mention/Reply: Using the @ sign before a user’s name in a tweet notifies them that they were referred to. A reply is a specific type of mention that references a specific tweet by the user.


●Retweet: When a user has a tweet come into his or her stream that he/she wants to share with his/her followers, the tweet can be “retweeted” (or forwarded) to his/her followers.


●Hashtag: Hashtags are keywords on Twitter. All hashtags are preceded with the “#” symbol, denoting that they are intended as a hashtag. Some common hashtags for music education include #musiced, #mpln (see below), and #musedchat.


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