Twitter

When you hear the word “tweet,” very rarely do you think of a teacher enhancing their knowledge within their profession. Educators are beginning to use social networking sites, like Twitter, to enhance their professional learning networks, and who’s to criticize using Twitter as a PLN? After all, the value of using sites like Twitter is that your educational network now has the potential to be worldwide, rather than just in your school or district. Anyone from anywhere can reply to your Tweets, making your collection of advice extremely diverse and nearly unlimited.
 * Twitter for Educators:**  **Creating a PLN**   **Jackson Long**

My usage of Twitter as a PLN peaked when I tagged a Web 2.0 tool in one of my tweets. The tool is called //Class Dojo//, and its main objective is to enhance student participation and behavior. The program is used as a tally system and rewards students who are on-task and involved with the daily lesson. Well, after a week of using the program, I enjoyed it so much that I felt it deserved a Twitter shout-out. The creators instantly followed me back and replied to my Tweet. I felt accomplished. Then, a couple weeks later, they contacted me again about providing direct feedback to improve their program, and I got to talk one on one with the creator and share my comments with him. This is a perfect example of how using Twitter can enhance your PLN and provide you with great opportunities.

A downfall of Twitter, and this isn’t really the site’s fault, more of my current school district, is that it’s blocked on most Internet filters. Therefore, I was unable to gain access at school (when I had the most to tweet about). I was confined to only being able to get connected during our class and at home in the evenings. For me, this stunted my appreciation for Twitter as a PLN a little. I could get through the block for only a minute at a time, so I was constantly receiving error messages while using Twitter. Another negative experience I had was when SpamBots began to follow me. At first, I didn’t have notifications sent to me when someone new began following me, but I quickly changed this in my Account Settings. Now I get an email notification anytime someone begins to follow me, so I'm aware.

By the end of the three-week usage period, I had about 20 followers, and I was following 25 people/organizations. I continued to use Twitter after this period; however, I didn’t focus on following anyone new. I fell into the routine of just tweeting updates or retweeting other people that I saw through educational trending topics. In the future, I will start following those I retweeted, because after spending some time with Twitter, I see that this is the polite thing to do. I got a little discouraged too because I was following quite a few people who didn’t follow me back. In that situation, I felt like I wasn’t getting the full benefits of a collaborative PLN because it was only working one way.

In the long run, I can see myself continuing to use Twitter as a PLN simply because of all the opportunities it promotes, especially if you want to try something new and different that no one in your district has attempted. The big focus through educational chats on Twitter is with technology and using the Internet as a powerful tool for teaching. A lot of the times, like with ClassDojo, you as a teacher have to troubleshoot problems by yourself, without any help. When Twitter allows you to instantly reach out for assistance with these new programs, it’s difficult to see why people wouldn’t use it as a PLN.

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