Microblogging

Twitter Day 1

I have previously stayed away from Twitter. My thought process was that I have a Facebook, Tumblr, GoodReads, a personal Pinterest, and a teacher Pinterest. Why do I need another social networking account? I always thought I had to have witty things to say to have a Twitter. But I never envisioned Twitter as a means for professional development and idea sharing. From my initial experiences on the site, it seems to be a great way to connect to people I would otherwise not get to interact with, such as the US Secretary of Education.

My first frustration came almost instantly. I picked a random assortment of education technology specialists to follow from the start. One of these people completely dominated my feed, posting new tweets every couple of minutes. That completely turned me off to following him. Even if he had good insight, my initial reaction is to not dig through all the tweets to find it.

Twitter Day 2

Our school technology team has been tossing around the idea of what it would look like to go 1 to 1. This was an interesting article that was really pertinent to me that someone tweeted on my feed: http://www.edtechmagazine.com/k12/article/2013/03/what-other-schools-can-learn-carmel-catholics-one-one-experience

I teach in a brand new school and we have such cool technology resources available to us, but it has been such a struggle to get most of the teachers in our building to use the technology. This was a really helpful link I found on my Twitter feed: http://plpnetwork.com/2013/03/27/hesitant-teachers-technology/

A downside to this whole Twitter site is that I could easily sit for hours going through my newsfeed reading great article after great article and getting tons of awesome new ideas. This may not seem like a downside, but it could be very time consuming! And I’m only following 11 people. I cant even imagine what my feed would look like if I had hundreds of people I followed.

Twitter Day 3

I LOVE all the cool ideas I’m finding on Twitter about BYOD (bring your own device.) It is such an interesting idea that I hadn’t heard of until recently, and now I feel much more versed in what BYOD is all about. This video shows ways to use BYOD effectively. Because BYOD can be done horribly and hinder student progress. http://www.edtechmagazine.com/k12/video/cosn-2013-developing-tech-savvy-teachers

I really like the Twitter format. Often, the tweet links you to a longer article, but you get the gist of the article in the tweet. It’s almost like an abstract and I know what the article will about before I begin to read it. This makes perusing my feed and deciding what is applicable to me and what is not applicable to me fairly quick and easy.

A cool aspect of Twitter is that you can interact with people whom you would never get to interact with, but on the flip side, I also think it is cool that I can follow Adams 12, my school district. This brings up news of neat things happening at schools right in my own backyard. I got this off Adams 12’s Twitter page. http://www.broomfieldenterprise.com/broomfield-schools/ci_22849659/mountain-view-preschoolers-act-up-under-big-top