Soundtrack for this post: Hello Beautiful Life – Skydiggers
There are many educators (and others) who are skeptical about the value of Twitter. This morning, several things occurred that would not have, had I not been on Twitter as I did other work on the computer.
1. I made a plan to visit Edna Sackson (@whatedsaid) at her school when I am in Melbourne in April.
This came about because I made a comment to a couple of teachers who had already commented her blog post 10 things you can’t just do on Monday in period 6… I arrived at the post because someone tweeted the link with a comment but unfortunately I don’t remember who that was.
As you can see we are both excited!
2. I exchanged tweets with my brother, Evan, a high school history teacher. In the process, I became aware that tech integration (which many of us are advocating for in elementary schools vs standalone ICT classes that teach skills isolation) isn’t the best model for secondary unless the students are digitally literate.
The conversation started over my tweeting a quote from the same blog post as above:
Evan replied and here’s how it played out:
And along the way Edna chimed in and included a link to a blog post by Iain Guest (@IaninSheffield) about discrete vs embedded ICT lessons.
Guess what?
3. I helped an HS special education teacher in Manila make professional connections.
Evan had mentioned that his colleague was having a hard time finding other special education teachers to connect with and he was encouraging him to try Twitter. He convinced Kevin to sign up (@KGStroudlusk) and I started sending him suggestions of people to follow. Within a few days, Kevin sent out this tweet:
One of my suggestions was Shawn Ram (@sram_socrates), a spec-ed teacher in Alberta. We exchanged a few tweets and I told him about Evan’s quest to help Kevin.
And he has been posting links to pass on and using his connections to send more suggestions to Kevin.
(The link goes to this site)
Tomorrow Evan is going to help Kevin set up a Twitter client so he can more easily follow some of Shawn’s suggestions.
4. I helped my brother build his argument to take to his admin about why Facebook should not be blocked at his school.
Evan wrote this blog post and tweeted about it:
I checked it out and sent this message out:
With minutes, one of my tweeps had sent it out as well:
And within a few hours, Evan had several comments on his post.
5. I got invited to be our school rep for a student film fest being put together by international schools here in Singapore.
If I hadn’t had a connection with Tyler (one that started and continues on Twitter though we’ve now met face-to-face a few times), he wouldn’t have thought of me.
6. I followed the tweets of some teachers who were in Hong Kong at an ICT in the PYP workshop.
Adding #ICTinPYP to their tweets, allowed me to follow along and see what different people were saying – not as good as being at the workshop in person but I did get some good ideas, I was able to share some of mine and this tweet about the wiki they worked on made me very happy!
So after a few hours of all of this, I tweeted:
To which my brother replied:
Nice post, Megan. I had a great time on Twitter yesterday too. It was great to connect with those in the ICTinPYP workshop, without being there and there’s something exciting about being in my 50’s and able to learn from and with young educators!
I watched your inspiring conversation with your brother too 🙂 Great to see teacher families involved in educational dialog. I need to get my son and daughter-in-law involved!
The possibilities of Twitter never cease to amaze me. Used in this way, it’s the most powerful learning experience.
See you next April!
I am so glad we have connected, Ed, and even happier that I get to meet you face-to-face soon.
Thanks for your comment.
Hi Megan,
I really love Twitter too. A great read thanks.
I thought you might be interested in Blackbird Pie – a tool that creates embed code out of each tweet you want save: http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/
Each tweet has its own url, so you just copy & paste into Blackbird Pie. I think the url is where it says, “27 minutes ago” on Twitter.
Happy Monday!
K-L
Great post. Makes a great case for the power of twitter and PLNs. I think I’ll refer a few peeps to read this.
Hmmmm… no mention of the black nail polish and blue hair conversation, though…
Thanks for the tip K-L!
Evan – the post was getting a bit long but the final tweet does make mention of blue hair. 🙂