How to Leverage your Own Connections to bring Community into your Classroom

Art Lightstone​​

From time to time, teachers will look to bring experts into their classrooms. However, searching for and locating such experts can be a sticking point for many teachers. Having said that, if you have taken the opportunity to leverage LinkedIn to connect with folks over the course of your teaching career - including the alumni that you yourself have taught, then you may be surprised to see how many experts you are already personally connected with. Moreover, LinkedIn provides a great set of tools that enable you to search through your existing connections to identify people who are, in some way, associated with a certain field or topic. 

LinkedIn is a great way to leverage your existing connections, and, no - you don't need to search through all your connections by eye. Rather, you can use LinkedIn's own search feature to search through your own  connections to find folks who are related to a given topic. To do this, just follow these five simple steps: 

1. Login to Linkedin
2. click on "My Network" (at the top)
3. click on "Connections" (upper left corner)
4. click "Search with filters" (hyperlink near top right)
5. type in a search string (ex. "climate change") in the search bar (upper left corner), and then hit enter.

Voila! There you have a list of all your own connections related to the topic you are searching for (ex. climate change).

Start using LinkedIn today to locate experts in your community who can bring real-world experience and insight into your classroom... and let me know how it goes!