Twitter Part 1

Our class’ most constant homework assignment is using our Twitter accounts to tweet, retweet, or respond to other tweets about technology in education. This also included following educators and organizations who post about using technology in school. According to many teachers who use Twitter regularly, it is an effective tool for building and connecting with their Personal Learning Network. In other words, they agree that it is a good site to use for sharing educational ideas and learning from other educators’ ideas. The outcome of this assignment, therefore, is to help us see trends and gain insights about the increasing use of technology in education today. Since I did not have a Twitter account before this class, I had to create one and get used to checking it regularly. At first, checking Twitter regularly was a little difficult because the only social media I constantly look at is Pinterest. Once I got into it, however, I started retweeting lots of posts from EdTech K-12 Magazine and some from Tara Linney. One of the most interesting posts I read from the former was about implementing a tool called Skype Classroom, which allows students to learn more about other cultures by chatting with students from other regions. This could also be used with authors who could discuss their books with students who just read it. I also found Tara Linney’s post about being “Internet kind” interesting because it stressed the importance of being a good citizen, even when students are being protected by online anonymity. I also discovered a trend of Minecraft being used in classrooms to teach math and social studies. Although this sounds like a cool idea, it may not be effective for every student. Another idea I was not sure about was a post by EdTech K-12 Magazine, which talked about the possibility of full-time online education for K-12 students. In response to this post, I said that it is an interesting system but that I also feel that it will not be as effective on students who learn best with hands-on activities. So far, I feel that I am adding valuable items to my Personal Learning Network; but I also feel that I am not really into using Twitter for building that network. As I have said before, I use Pinterest a lot. This is because I can actually search ideas according to a specific category, and the posts that appear will lead me to the source and go into full detail about how to implement those ideas. With Twitter, I can only search through the posts of other educators and hope that I will find a good idea soon. Hopefully, this opinion will change by the next time I blog about my Twitter experiences.