Tweeting and Professional Development

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Eleven ways to make the most of                 Use Twitter to Create a Global Classroom
Twitter's education chatter

This week, I read two articles about Twitter and its use in teaching and in professional development.

After participating in a professional development twitter session this week, I can see that I can use Twitter in order to connect with other educators across the country and around the world. The group chat that I attended was informative and showed me easy ways how to use eBook creation in the classroom.  In "Use Twitter to Create a Global Classroom", the authors met each other online. How neat is that? I might be able to meet a future collaborator in my next session online.

However, I would need to really consider which chat sessions I would attend, as stated in the education chatter article (see the first link above). There are so many options and I need to establish a healthy balance between getting professional development inside my school versus online. Sometimes, the problem is that there are too many options for integrating technology. There's a lot of sites out there and I might want to focus on only the sites that I feel will work best with my current group of students. I have realized that it is good to continue to change it up each day, but I want always the major focus to be on the instruction of my students.

I admit that I am having more difficulty seeing Twitter be used with my students. Most importantly, it is blocked at the school. The major unfortunate problem is that they might be too distracted by the other pages on Twitter instead of focusing on the assignment at hand. I have allowed students to interact with each other through Google's educational platform, but I will be a little hesitant of using Twitter in the classroom because anyone can tweet.