Tweet, Tweet

Recently I revived my Twitter handle for a class I was taking.  I still don't love Twitter, but I do respect that there are some pretty specific scenarios and questions that hands down are best solved by Twitter. In a professional sense, it's a nice way to get a quick overview of ideas from people that I like to follow. It's faster and easier than checking in on all the websites and blogs. Twitter lets me see a quick overview of ideas that I could then go follow up on the blogs. As is the case with most of my social media use, I can see myself as a passive user of Twitter, taking the information that is helpful to me, but rarely posting. Although maybe that will change. After my very first tweet, one of my co-workers mentioned the very next day that she followed my link and also read the article. So perhaps I'll end up using its power.

Top Twitter Resources

Google Teacher Tribe

Shake Up Learning

A new resource that I discovered via Twitter is the Google Teacher Tribe Podcast @GTeacherTribe. This show is hosted by Kasey Bell from Shake Up Learning @ShakeUpLearning and Matt Miller from Ditch That Textbook @DitchThatTxtbk. This podcast seems great. The new season has just started, and the first episode did a great job of summarizing all the new updates to Google Classroom. While many of the changes are pretty intuitive, there are some new things that I definitely learned from their podcast. There are also many people in my school who are just beginning to use Google Classroom so this is really helpful for me to reference as I try to assist them. After listening to the first podcast, I am also going to listen to some previous episodes on Google Keep. They were raving about all the ways they use it, and I have

Ditch That Textbook

 struggled to figure out how to incorporate it. I have trouble getting my notes in Keep organized, so I'm interested to see if they can offer some new ideas on how to manage that.

TweetChat

Did you know that groups of people meet on Twitter to hold discussions? A moderator asks questions and people (teachers) from around the country hold an entire conversation on Twitter following a #. This was obviously an completely foreign concept to me, but my first tweetchat experience was much better than I expected.  I initially was planning to join the #ICEilchat, but I ended up participating in the #mschat (middle school chat) hosted by @Jeremybballer. I am really happy that I stumbled into this chat for my first experience. It was very slow moving which made it easy to understand and follow. There were only 6 or 7 other educators participating and only 6 questions asked during the hour. I could easily follow it and not be overwhelmed. It also happened that most of the other middle school teachers also taught ELA and I discovered a great new story writing app, Storybird that I'm excited to try out. I also watched a lot of the #ICEilchat, but did not actively participate. That chat was much busier with both questions and people, and more challenging to follow my first time. It did look interesting, and I have marked future #ICEchats on my calendar. I may try another one.