Last Week on Twitter ...

[Gary Anderson]

Although Twitter is an important part of my on-going professional development, I find that many people not on Twitter think that it’s a junky way to spend time. Sure, there is a certain amount of blah blah blah on Twitter, and if a user wants to receive a steady stream of jokes, celebrity news, and political rants, Twitter can definitely provide that.

But if a user builds a solid list of people to follow, Twitter can be enormously helpful.

For the past week, I kept track of the specific ways that Twitter helped me:

· Participated in a dynamic discussion about effective group work

· Read an article about Rhode Island’s standardized testing program that goes for three weeks in October

· Kept up on the progress of a friend running in the Chicago Marathon

· Found out about the existence of the Don’t let the Pigeon DVD, an excellent video version of one of our family’s favorite picture books

· Found a teacher with resources about the Roman Empire for a history teacher colleague

· Asked followers what they like/dislike about Shakespeare on a live feed with 208s

· Communicated with a Canadian principal about how teachers at his school write blogs as part of their professional development days

· Found a great literature resource with audio and links: www.mirrorsandwindows.com

· Added an RSS feed from Jon Winokur’s Advice to Writers to our Writers Week web page

· Followed live updates on Chilean mine rescue

· Followed live updates from our local school board meeting

· Received updates from Amazon about some excellent free MP3 songs

· Heard from a student absent from class who checked Twitter for the journal topic he missed.

· Received a friendly reminder that I was in the process of missing a meeting

· Received a valuable list of other American Studies teachers on Twitter.

· Found an important article about the downside of mandated teaching practices

· Read numerous blogs from educators who model reflection and progressive thinking

· Communicated with a teacher in a neighboring state about having our students comment on each other’s blogs

Along with English Companion Ning, Twitter provides me with valuable professional development on a daily basis.

If you’ve had positive or negative experiences with Twitter, I’d like to hear about them. If I can help you get going on Twitter, please let me know. Thanks for reading this.

[JohnPaulus V Arcangel]

The idea about telling others about my personal life just get to me. Its like I'm presenting my problems on a silver plate, seeking for pity and attention. However I do like the way you've been using these social networking organizations.

[Ben Luke]

I'm not personally on Twitter, and I think that it's a good thing for me. It is probably very helpful to some, like you said that it helped you with that huge list just in the past week, but I think the idea of Twitter is just silly. I don't really need to know what everyone is doing at all times during the day. To me, one status update of what is on my mind every few days is good enough for me. Granted, that is Facebook and not Twitter, but even on Facebook I get annoyed of people who post a ton of status updates every 5 minutes.