One of my goals this
summer is to increase my professional development by using the internet in a
more savvy way; this includes taking online courses via Coursera, augmenting and organizing
websites that have or will prove to be useful for my teaching, and joining Twitter
since I had heard how useful it is a place to engage with other educators.
After just a few hours as a member, what an enhancement this last step has already proven to be! Wow!
The first person I
followed was my math teacher friend, who is a genius at using the internet for
his personal learning network (PLN), and he promptly sent out one tweet that
explained I had joined Twitter and was looking for some history tweeps. Literally
within minutes other people had tweeted suggestions for people to follow and
hashtags to look at, and from there I was on to exploring a blog from a new
social studies teacher (which I quickly added here to my own blog roll) and I
explored a link to an article in The Atlantic with images from America in 1963.
This means I had colleagues and primary
sources at my fingertips within minutes of joining Twitter. Needless to say I'm
still figuring out the site...I've been using the Twitter glossary page to
figure out how to use "Lists", "Favorites", and
"Hashtags" efficiently, and I found another site that helped me embed
my Tweets to this blog, so for someone who may need some help with this
wonderful resource, here are some very small tips:
1. Retweets rule! I love the
idea that people can so easily share information and web sites simply by retweeting, or copying a tweet for their own audience. With a
mission of simply sharing information, I'm so surprised I haven't joined
Twitter sooner.
2. Find helpful hashtags! #sschat was
the first helpful hashtag I found for collecting websites and finding people to follow. I also liked #sstlap and #tlap, both of which are
related to the book Teach like a Pirate, which I haven't read yet, but which is on my Goodreads list of books to read. These hashtags helped
me find educators from different subject areas who were getting together
to discuss pedagogy as a whole. I discovered that there are rich forums
for social studies teachers to get together and discuss topics put forth
by moderators in the subject area, so hopefully I'll join in the next
'conference' in about two weeks!
Any other helpful
tips would be wonderful!
