While attending Arkansas Leadership Academy in 2010, I registered for my Twitter account and began following leaders in education. Now I follow approximately 1300 mostly educators, and I have participated in a few chats. However, I hadn’t ever tried using Tweetdeck. Usually, I would just check Twitter now and then on my phone and came up with many useful things that way. I didn’t do much sharing, but I hope to change that. Now, using Tweetdeck makes it much easier to manage, especially during a quickly moving chat.
So, I started following six hashtags on Tweetdeck including #edchat, #edtechchat, #highered, #EduAr, #edtechafterdark, and #ISTE17. #edchat is really all things education. #edtechchat and #edtechafterdark have more of technology focus. #EduAr is where I can connect with other educators in Arkansas. #highered is focused on teaching and learning in higher education. #ISTE17 will provide a continuous conversation of all that’s going on in San Antonio during this year’s conference. That’s a good mix for me.
It didn’t take long to find several valuable ideas and resources. EdTech for Higher Education posted a list of 50 must-read higher ed blogs on #highered. Nice to have a resource like that that kind of weeds out some blogs and lists some of the better ones. Also on #highered, I found a blog called Teaching Academia that looks interesting. In this post, the author is reflecting on developing content for her online course. Lately, I’ve been considering trying my hand at some academic writing, and I found a post on #highered with a video explaining the different levels of acceptance from editors. That was new information for me.
An educator that I’ve followed for some time posted a paper.li which I’ve never looked at before. It looks like an interesting tool that I may try out for curating and sharing current news in education and educational technology.
In addition, I picked up a couple resources from Free Tech 4 Teachers. One was a list of three resources for images and videos in the public domain. They happen to be ones I’ve used in the past, but a couple of them had fallen off my radar. Another was a citation tool called Cite It In – something new to try out.
When I first signed up for my Twitter account, I would never have dreamed how beneficial it would be for me professionally. I’ve been picking up resources and ideas on Twitter for years. Now as I plan to step up my game on the sharing and interacting side of it, I can only imagine that it will be even more valuable to me. For just-in-time PD, I really can’t think of anything better. This quote from Dave Mulder rings true for me.
For those who are new to Twitter, here’s my advice… (With thanks to @KarlyMoura for creating the graphic.) #12daystwitter pic.twitter.com/KadJbBeyvq— Dave Mulder, Ed.D. (@d_mulder) December 1, 2016
Catalyst 