To Tweet or Not to Tweet, That is the Question
Kathy Moorehead
March 30, 2014
ED 702
Common Patterns of Participation on Twitter
Directions: Follow the postings of an educator using Twitter for a two week period, and then complete this handout. (Feel free to choose any educator using Twitter. Include his or her name, a direct link to his or her Twitter stream, and a short description of his or her professional work.)
Name of Educator: The C. Kindergartener
Background : The C.Kindergartener @DinaMgd Kindergarten #teacher, love #crafts, mommy of two..doggies, sharing teaching#resources for #kindergarten - #2nd http://theconstantkindergartener.blogspot.com/
teacherspayteachers.com/Store/The-Cons…
I wanted to follow something that could be truly useful to me, so I finally found this site that tweets out lesson plans for kindergarten which link you to free downloadables and lesson plan ideas. This was called the Kindergarten Teacher. This led me to another Kindergarten teacher who looked like she was tweeting out fairly regularly, so I started following her, the C.Kindergartener.
Dates of monitoring : I reviewed the tweets from March 20th back to March 1st, 2014. There have been 15 tweets in that timeframe.
Types of Activities Observed
[ x ] Sharing knowledge and resources [ ] Monitoring educational news sources
[ ] Tracking important conferences [ ] Encouraging reflection
[ ] Gathering instant feedback [ x] Mentoring colleagues
Other:
Frequency of Posting
[ X ] About twice a week [ ] About once a day [ ] Several times per day
Questions to Consider
This site is a work sharing site so the pattern is consistent. The educator is sharing lesson plans aimed at the kindergarten level to an audience of other kindergarten teachers. She also re-tweets other teachers’ tweets or inspirational messages or graphics. I really liked all of her tweets. Of course, it is very valuable to me to see her art projects, lesson plans and just what she is doing in her classroom around the holiday activities, Women’s History month, St.Patrick’s Day, etc. She only has two personal tweets, one about her birthday and one about her dogs, during this timeframe so I think she keeps her posts mostly to classroom related material. She posts photos of student work samples, and that is always fun to see.
· I can get messages from people here, you need to click the envelope in the top tool bar
· The #Discover can lead me to some people/groups I might want to follow
· How you can “favorite” something if you like it but don’t want to re-tweet it
· You can go into other peoples’ lists and see who the members are and follow them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjfQcMdGoPw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za4GQKlet5E
Well, just like other social media sites, you can waste a lot of time “going down the rabbit hole”. This site looks cool, so I start seeing who is following this and that and ….five hours later. Especially when a technology is new to you, you can get really sucked in. Hopefully, the novelty will wear off and you will “use Twitter responsibly”. I learned that lesson before on Facebook. I couldn’t go a day without everything that was in my Newsfeed, but then I realized that I did indeed want to have a life. I started pruning the periphery people and the heavy posters, and posting much less myself. It’s just a new type of learning curve. I give myself a limit of “shares” on Facebook, so I am sure I will do the same on Twitter. My husband had an uncle who was always present but rarely spoke. He was a nuclear submarine engineer, so you can see how this would be a good character trait for someone who knew the trident missile secrets. I remember how a giant hush would fall over the room when he said something. Everyone stopped. Everyone listened intently. I’m the opposite of that type of person. I like to “keep the party going”, but in terms of social media, I can see how this might be an advantage.
Questions remaining: Can I build Twitter groups or do you just need to start a different Twitter account. For example, could I have a family account that only my family members could see, and a school parent account or group that only the student parents could see? Can anyone follow you who wants to or can you limit your followers to maintain privacy? What are the LISTS and FAVORITES features?
Answers: I found a Youtube tutorial on what Twitter Lists are at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za4GQKlet5E. That explained how you can set up a private group or list.
If I tweet out a message to a parent who has a twitter account, who is on a classroom list I created, can they re-tweet that message out? I am wondering if I set up a twitter list for my classroom and tweeted class photos or messages, would parents be able to re-tweet these outside of the private list? Obviously, that wouldn’t work.
I had attended a seminar by Alan November last year, and he introduced me to how Twitter could be a really useful tool to me, but somehow after creating my twitter account, I just lost interest. To be honest, I was not at all excited about building a Twitter account. Twitter just felt unfamiliar to me and yet another hoop I was now required to jump through as part of the process of getting my masters. I really just planned to do what I had to do and then drop it like a hot potato. I am just not one of those people who wants to be “constantly connected”. My idea of a perfect vacation is one in which there is no technology access, a beach with no wifi. As much as I truly love learning all these new technologies, I just didn’t want something “pushing in” to my phone and beeping all the time or flooding my email account. I also didn’t want another place that I had to “check” before I could relax when I got home. “Didn’t you see my tweet?” That is what I thought Twitter would do, just make my life more complicated rather than help me.
Then I attended the NVUSD EDCHAT and participated in my first group chat. That was a hurdle in itself because I had forgotten even how to tweet, so I had to re-learn that process. I finally made it in by the end of the 30 min. window. Whew! At the second scheduled chat the next week, I actually learned some valuable information, as our topic was reaching ELL learners. I was able to share some good strategies I knew, as well, and then people started talking to me. That was fun! I think I really like the interactive feature of Twitter when you create group chats, and I can see further applications for using it that way. I am also interested in developing my own Teachers Pay Teachers site, so Twitter might be a useful tool in helping me steer traffic to that site. I also would like to participate in television online tweeting. I watch the business news each morning and television media has become very interactive. “Tweet us at @squakonthestreet and tell us what you think of …” It is kind of fun to understand what they are talking about and know that I can now tweet in my responses to these types of interactive media shows. I guess it is fun in general to feel like you are not falling off the map but keeping up with the changes in technology. I never want to become one of those “old people” wandering around and grumbling about how the world has changed for the worse and how we’re all “going to hell in a hand basket”. I just want to keep up with and embrace the changes, even if I do need some down time in the evening and my twice yearly week on the beach.
Now I feel a much more comfortable with Twitter and actually am excited about how it could actually be a useful tool to me, so thank you for that. I think I just have to transfer the learning curve in this process to other technologies that I may feel resistance to for similar reasons. I think I will do that because I have always been pretty good at identifying my fears and jumping towards them. I think that trying to get a masters that includes a technology component is pretty good evidence of that. I am not a digital native, but I’m going to be the best darn digital non-native I can be! Or as Thoreau would say, the best pygmy I can be.
“Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?” ~ Thoreau
March 30, 2014
ED 702
Common Patterns of Participation on Twitter
Directions: Follow the postings of an educator using Twitter for a two week period, and then complete this handout. (Feel free to choose any educator using Twitter. Include his or her name, a direct link to his or her Twitter stream, and a short description of his or her professional work.)
Name of Educator: The C. Kindergartener
Background : The C.Kindergartener @DinaMgd Kindergarten #teacher, love #crafts, mommy of two..doggies, sharing teaching#resources for #kindergarten - #2nd http://theconstantkindergartener.blogspot.com/
teacherspayteachers.com/Store/The-Cons…
I wanted to follow something that could be truly useful to me, so I finally found this site that tweets out lesson plans for kindergarten which link you to free downloadables and lesson plan ideas. This was called the Kindergarten Teacher. This led me to another Kindergarten teacher who looked like she was tweeting out fairly regularly, so I started following her, the C.Kindergartener.
Dates of monitoring : I reviewed the tweets from March 20th back to March 1st, 2014. There have been 15 tweets in that timeframe.
Types of Activities Observed
[ x ] Sharing knowledge and resources [ ] Monitoring educational news sources
[ ] Tracking important conferences [ ] Encouraging reflection
[ ] Gathering instant feedback [ x] Mentoring colleagues
Other:
Frequency of Posting
[ X ] About twice a week [ ] About once a day [ ] Several times per day
Questions to Consider
- What trends do you notice in the patterns of participation for the educator that you’ve been monitoring? Are certain behaviors more common than others? Are there certain behaviors that seem more valuable to you than others? Which ones? Why?
This site is a work sharing site so the pattern is consistent. The educator is sharing lesson plans aimed at the kindergarten level to an audience of other kindergarten teachers. She also re-tweets other teachers’ tweets or inspirational messages or graphics. I really liked all of her tweets. Of course, it is very valuable to me to see her art projects, lesson plans and just what she is doing in her classroom around the holiday activities, Women’s History month, St.Patrick’s Day, etc. She only has two personal tweets, one about her birthday and one about her dogs, during this timeframe so I think she keeps her posts mostly to classroom related material. She posts photos of student work samples, and that is always fun to see.
- Did you learn any lessons that will be valuable in your primary work while monitoring the Twitter stream of this educator? What were they? How did this information help you do your job better or make your work easier?
· I can get messages from people here, you need to click the envelope in the top tool bar
· The #Discover can lead me to some people/groups I might want to follow
· How you can “favorite” something if you like it but don’t want to re-tweet it
· You can go into other peoples’ lists and see who the members are and follow them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjfQcMdGoPw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za4GQKlet5E
- Did you learn any lessons about networking in social media spaces while monitoring the Twitter stream of this educator? What were they?
Well, just like other social media sites, you can waste a lot of time “going down the rabbit hole”. This site looks cool, so I start seeing who is following this and that and ….five hours later. Especially when a technology is new to you, you can get really sucked in. Hopefully, the novelty will wear off and you will “use Twitter responsibly”. I learned that lesson before on Facebook. I couldn’t go a day without everything that was in my Newsfeed, but then I realized that I did indeed want to have a life. I started pruning the periphery people and the heavy posters, and posting much less myself. It’s just a new type of learning curve. I give myself a limit of “shares” on Facebook, so I am sure I will do the same on Twitter. My husband had an uncle who was always present but rarely spoke. He was a nuclear submarine engineer, so you can see how this would be a good character trait for someone who knew the trident missile secrets. I remember how a giant hush would fall over the room when he said something. Everyone stopped. Everyone listened intently. I’m the opposite of that type of person. I like to “keep the party going”, but in terms of social media, I can see how this might be an advantage.
- What questions about common patterns of communication on Twitter do you still have? What excites you about building your own network on Twitter?
Questions remaining: Can I build Twitter groups or do you just need to start a different Twitter account. For example, could I have a family account that only my family members could see, and a school parent account or group that only the student parents could see? Can anyone follow you who wants to or can you limit your followers to maintain privacy? What are the LISTS and FAVORITES features?
Answers: I found a Youtube tutorial on what Twitter Lists are at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za4GQKlet5E. That explained how you can set up a private group or list.
If I tweet out a message to a parent who has a twitter account, who is on a classroom list I created, can they re-tweet that message out? I am wondering if I set up a twitter list for my classroom and tweeted class photos or messages, would parents be able to re-tweet these outside of the private list? Obviously, that wouldn’t work.
- How do you intend to build on this learning experience? Will you study the Twitter streams of additional educators? Are you ready to start your own Twitter account?
I had attended a seminar by Alan November last year, and he introduced me to how Twitter could be a really useful tool to me, but somehow after creating my twitter account, I just lost interest. To be honest, I was not at all excited about building a Twitter account. Twitter just felt unfamiliar to me and yet another hoop I was now required to jump through as part of the process of getting my masters. I really just planned to do what I had to do and then drop it like a hot potato. I am just not one of those people who wants to be “constantly connected”. My idea of a perfect vacation is one in which there is no technology access, a beach with no wifi. As much as I truly love learning all these new technologies, I just didn’t want something “pushing in” to my phone and beeping all the time or flooding my email account. I also didn’t want another place that I had to “check” before I could relax when I got home. “Didn’t you see my tweet?” That is what I thought Twitter would do, just make my life more complicated rather than help me.
Then I attended the NVUSD EDCHAT and participated in my first group chat. That was a hurdle in itself because I had forgotten even how to tweet, so I had to re-learn that process. I finally made it in by the end of the 30 min. window. Whew! At the second scheduled chat the next week, I actually learned some valuable information, as our topic was reaching ELL learners. I was able to share some good strategies I knew, as well, and then people started talking to me. That was fun! I think I really like the interactive feature of Twitter when you create group chats, and I can see further applications for using it that way. I am also interested in developing my own Teachers Pay Teachers site, so Twitter might be a useful tool in helping me steer traffic to that site. I also would like to participate in television online tweeting. I watch the business news each morning and television media has become very interactive. “Tweet us at @squakonthestreet and tell us what you think of …” It is kind of fun to understand what they are talking about and know that I can now tweet in my responses to these types of interactive media shows. I guess it is fun in general to feel like you are not falling off the map but keeping up with the changes in technology. I never want to become one of those “old people” wandering around and grumbling about how the world has changed for the worse and how we’re all “going to hell in a hand basket”. I just want to keep up with and embrace the changes, even if I do need some down time in the evening and my twice yearly week on the beach.
Now I feel a much more comfortable with Twitter and actually am excited about how it could actually be a useful tool to me, so thank you for that. I think I just have to transfer the learning curve in this process to other technologies that I may feel resistance to for similar reasons. I think I will do that because I have always been pretty good at identifying my fears and jumping towards them. I think that trying to get a masters that includes a technology component is pretty good evidence of that. I am not a digital native, but I’m going to be the best darn digital non-native I can be! Or as Thoreau would say, the best pygmy I can be.
“Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?” ~ Thoreau