Thing 3: Twitter and Other Online Communities

OK, so I have to be honest I thought this thing experience was going to be one of the easiest. I also thought I was quite sure that I would not even consider joining Twitter for various reasons that I will not get involved in sharing at this time.

As you can see from my PLN above- as I explored Twitter I did find it to be a very valuable tool. I found many other educators to follow. I found organizations that I am involved in to follow. I actually felt a similar experience exploring Twitter that I had when I first discovered Pinterest many years ago. I can see that if I did not keep myself focused I could spend hours exploring and discovering. I will commit to exploring daily but will also do this with mindfulness and purpose. I believe having a PLN will help keep me focused.

I will definitely use Twitter as a resource of information and resources professionally.

I did take some time to reach out to a few people I know on Twitter. I was surprised to see so many people on Twitter and found it interesting to "lurk a while" and see what their interests and lists were. I definitely found others lists very helpful tools for building a networking experience. 

I also explored some groups on Facebook. I have always used Facebook as a personal social platform but to my delight I found many professional groups to follow. Our district has a Facebook page but we do not use Facebook or Twitter as an instrument to network with students. Facebook and Twitter are actually both blocked on our district network. With research and discussion it is a possibility that this could be changed for our upper level students or could be used as a school to home network. As I shared in my last post, I do not think that our elementary students have enough of an understanding of digital citizenship to use such a public forum.

I did find some social networks that I found interesting for elementary students. These are what I found that I would like to explore : EPALS, SCRATCH, and MAKEWAVES.

I also realized that I have networks that I don't use to their full capacity. I spent sometime updating my LinkIn and Schoology accounts. I also reviewed information shared by my colleagues in two shared google classrooms I have joined within our district. One is a tech classroom and one is for our one on one classrooms. Last but not least, I began rereading and discovering as much information as I could in one day from the Cool Tools classroom.

As you can see my PLN is not complete but my plan is started and in place. I realize that one week is not enough time to put an entire plan in place and that there are so many resources to explore and discover but I feel good about having it started and I am excited to continue growing in this area. I will continue adding to this post or additional posts as I formally complete my PLN and become a  more seasoned Twitter user.

Isn't funny that the very area you think you will grow the least in- turns into the area you learn the most from?