Tweet Tweet!

Exploring the Twitter world has been fun, eye-opening, and at times a little overwhelming. I have used Twitter in the past, mostly for an easy source of news as I followed the city police of the city I was living in as well as CTV. Never an active tweeter but I did use it a bit so it wasn’t completely foreign to me when we had to create an account this fall for my EDTC 300 class. With that being said, I was a bit skeptical about what I would find on the platform as I had known it to be an app full of memes (at times, inappropriate), sport scores, people voicing their opinions & at times attacking others (unfortunately, this is common amongst all social media).

Since rejoining the Twitter world as an aspiring educator I have been pleasantly surprised!

There is a whole community of teachers that I never could have imagined existing – it is awesome!! The level of networking that Twitter provides is unbelievable, it give me the warm and fuzzy’s knowing we aren’t alone in our teaching journeys.  At times I feel as though I have information overload but when I take a few deep breaths and start to sift through the tweets I am able to see the good.

I appreciate its informal ability to allow us to connect with other students or educators, resource pages and administrators. I appreciate the amount of resources that I find on there that I don’t know if I would have been exposed to otherwise. As it has been about a month since I have become active on this platform again I noticed my algorithm has really zoned in on my common searches – my feed has a lot of Middle School and Mathematics accounts!

My favourite feature about Twitter is the ability to “Quote” a tweet, it allows me to Retweet and give credit to the original source but I am also able to add a note as well. With the high volume of tweeting I have done this lets me better organize my thoughts so when I am scrolling back I know why I was so drawn to it in the first place!

Twitter has the potential to be a great tool while working on professional development – it allows connection with fellow educators across the world and in our own city! There are many tweets that have me reflecting on my personal pedagogy and how I want to approach teaching. Though still slightly skeptical, I am warming up to the platform with the more time I spend on it.

I am still not familiar on Twitter chats, but I am looking to learn more this coming week. Please feel free to follow me @alli_higgins17 and we can navigate this weird world that is Twitter together!