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.

#edtechchat

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So, I attended the edtechchat on Twitter last night. I liked the ability to answer questions and see the answers to questions from the moderators. Everyone was very supportive of each others' remarks and it was very interesting to see viewpoints of many different people across the country. It was nice to see that there were other teachers that have used Chromebooks and iPads in the classroom.

The topic of discussion was eBooks. When I first entered the discussion, I was hesitant as to how I would integrate creating eBooks into classroom instruction. I didn't exactly know how to create them or even how to help my students create them. After the hour long discussion, I started to develop my ideas on how I could help my students create eBooks and I even integrated those ideas into a lesson today.

Here's some major considerations about using twitter chats as professional development:

#1. You don't have to know a lot about the topic to join. As a person who didn't know a great deal about eBooks before yesterday, it is a great place to start talking and seeing how people simply use technology to enhance instruction.
#2. You can communicate with people that have successfully integrated technology into the classroom and get ideas from them. The conversation does not have to be limited to the main questions.
#3. Don't be afraid to ask questions yourself. I answered a few questions about eBooks from other participants and it seemed to be very useful for them. For example, I have seen eBooks be used in the younger grades when I substitute taught, so this was useful information for an undergraduate student that's trying to think of some of the basics on how it's used.

The downside to Twitter is the constant refreshing. It bugged my eyes after a while. I hope I can find another way to update the website without hurting my eyes in the feed.

Therefore, this is useful if I am trying to get involved in learning the basics of different types of technology. I hope I can find other types of Twitter accounts that may help me with Chromebooks especially in the math classroom.