I read the educause.com 7 Things You Should Know About Twitter and was pretty disappointed. I thought the fact that the article was citing numbers from 2006 and 2007 showed how outdated it was. While 5 years isn't that long ago the use of Twitter in the last 5 years has skyrocketed. That being said it did get me thinking about Twitter. I think using Twitter is a great thing. I use it all the time in my personal life and have recently opened a public account for use with my classes. The reason I decided to open one was because I noticed that in the past year or so my students have totally gotten into twitter. They love to scrawl FMOT (follow me on twitter) with their twitter names on my board. I am constantly erasing them. Then it finally clicked that it would be a great way to stay connected with students and leave posts about stuff that is happening in class, assignments, quotes, or other things.
Another reason I use Twitter professionally is to follow other teachers to get ideas. I follow @thenerdyteacher and find that his posts are incredibly inspiring. I followed his blog as part of my rss feed and have found a ton of great resources that I am able to bookmark using my delicious account. He also started a real time Great Gatsby which my class is currently reading. It is really funny for the students to follow along and it is a good tool to use for extension of the novel.
I love that all these new technologies I am being introduced to are really starting to work together. I think this is a class that I will actually be able to use. I know I am able to take a couple things from all of my Masters classes but this class seems like it is transforming my online presence and I'm excited to have that happen!
No comments:
Post a Comment