Twitter as a Tool for Collaboration Twitter is a well known social media platform that is used all over the world. I have one that I made freshman year of college and haven’t looked at since that shares my thoughts on memes and whatever I was doing as a college freshman. Obviously, some Twitter accounts are useless, but others can be a great tool for educators. When it is used a classroom tool for students, they can learn about different cultures as they connect with classes in other parts of the world. One teacher, Amy Presley, found that Twitter was helpful for learning from other educators from around the world. It became a wonderful tool and PLN for her (Carpenter et al, 2016). Cult of pedagogy also suggests using Twitter for this purpose, but gives teachers more concrete steps to take to get the most out of the site as possible. Once you have created a Twitter account, it’s time to find some people to follow. Using hashtags and the search options, it’s easy to find other educators on Twitter who are also in a similar situation. People share links and ideas as tweets that others can go check out on their own. By following these people instead of doggo memes, educators can get useful links to classroom resources right on their Twitter feed which is fairly easy to check and keep up with. Users are also able to post their own ideas and tag people in them who should check them out. Hashtags can also get people to look at your posts if they are something similar to what that person wants to find. If an educator wants to look up something specific like using QR codes in your classroom, they can look that up in the search bar or find it using hashtags. They could even make a tweet asking others about resources about that topic. If you have enough followers, you might get tweeted at about that topic of interest. This aspect of Twitter is appealing to me because it would allow me to connect with other educators about what they are trying in their classes. Our group article on the benefits of Twitter discussed the importance of getting in touch with others to avoid isolation at school (Carpenter et al, 2016). This is something I could use as I try to plan things in my classes at Miller since we are not expected to collaborate with other teachers much so it does not happen often. I makeup pretty much everything I do and could use as many ideas as I can find. Some educators also use Twitter as a tool in their classrooms that the students can use. I found pages where teachers had posted homework assignments or used Twitter chat to talk to students around the world. This seems a little less practical for my classes since we do not have reliable access to computers. Many of my students do not have access to a computer at home either, so I hesitate to do anything that they would have to keep up with outside of school. A few weeks ago I asked my students what a hashtag does. This was part of a lesson on universal themes and I was trying to get them to make a connection between the way hashtags connect ideas and photos to the way universal themes connect stories. I found out that most of my sixth graders and quite a few of my seventh graders had no idea what a hashtag was or how they worked. If I were to use something like Twitter in my classes, we would have to spend a ton of time learning how to use it before we could use it for anything educational. Here is the link to the Cult of Pedagogy I refer to in this article and the journal article that my group used. https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/how-to-use-twitter/
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