Journal 2- Join the Flock! & Enhance Your Twitter Experience

Ferguson, H. (2010). Join the flock!. Learning & Leading with Technology, 37(8), 12-15. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-and-leading/February-2012.aspx

McClintock Miller, S. (2010). Enhance your twitter experience. Learning & Leading with Technology, 37(8), 14-17. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-and-leading/February-2012.aspx

Summary:  The “Join the Flock!” article talks about networking in online communities, like Twitter.  It explains how Twitter can be used to follow and collaborate with different people and learn new ideas from different groups of people.  By having a list of educators to follow, a Twitter user can learn about new tools, resources, project ideas or other information relating to education.  One of things that I love about Twitter, which is also mentioned in the article, is the voluntary participation.  The conversation and amount of participation is up to the Tweeter.  I can browse various tweets and not be concerned with any obligation to tweet or respond to posts.

Question 1:  How can I use my Twitter account to as an educational tool?
I can follow other educators and school administrators to learn about different lesson plans, project ideas, and educational news.  I can also include the students and parents to keep them updated with different things happening in the classroom (similar to my classroom newsletter).

Summary:  The “Enhance Your Twitter Experience” article gives advice on organizing and managing Twitter accounts.  The hashtags are a really great and easy way to relate a post to “trends” and search through other Twitter posts.  I love the organizers that are offered through the TweetDeck and HootSuite websites.  There is so much information on Twitter, especially if you have different lists of people you follow, so it’s a great way to keep manage information.  I love browsing around different networking websites but I feel overwhelmed by all the information, links, and articles.  I could really utilize these websites to help me obtain all the information and keep track of resources.

Question 2:  How can I organize my TweetDeck or HootSuite to better manage my online communities?
I can separate my Twitter followers based on their posts.  Different columns can separate and organize different topics like, classroom technology, education news, lessons, projects, etc.