Twitter has been a form of social media that I have had the most mixed feelings to using. On one hand, I can see the accessibility that Twitter has in providing a place for people from all sorts of backgrounds to be able to come together and connect over different topics, ideas, or issues. Resources can easily and efficiently be shared, and you can create more personal connections with individuals and organizations. As an educator, I have the ability to be able to connect with other educators and find resources to use in my future teaching and my own learning as a teacher.
On the other hand, in the same way that I feel blogs can be quite vulnerable, Twitter feels too open to potential critique, especially since you have a limited number of word characters that you can use to share what you are thinking. Unlike Instagram or Facebook where pictures most often accompany a post, Twitter tends to be more words focused. I might struggle with Twitter because I feel a bit more insecure regarding the quality of what I write, or that I myself tend to prefer seeing posts that contain images compared to just words.
In my second year of post-secondary, my teacher had us use Twitter in a similar way that we are using it right now in our EDTC300 class. He had us use an assigned hashtag to keep all of our posts in one location, and we were expected to make tweets each week. However, instead of sharing resources, we were tasked with writing quotes from readings in our class. Even though I have had this prior experience with using Twitter, I am still not a huge fan of using it, although I do see why teachers might have their students use it.
Regarding my experience with SaskEdChat, I can see the benefit of using it in connecting educators (or future educators) together and creating a space to have healthy and productive dialogue regarding different educational topics. I personally felt quite shy and struggled a bit with wanting to answer the questions, however, I did like seeing the variety of responses that everyone that took part incorporated into the SaskEdChat.
In summary, I am not a huge fan of Twitter, but I am willing to keep trying it and look for more benefits in using it.
