Week 2 The world of Twitter

This week has been an eye opener for me.  As I stated in my discussion section, I am very new to twitter.  My district was having a twitter challenge for teachers to tweet about different ways to engage students while learning.  Our campus goal was to have 100% participation from every teacher and administrator to win the challenge.  The councilor asked me if I had a twitter account and she set one up for me.  She even did my first tweet for me.  The next week she came to help me but I told her I had to actually do it to learn it.  I did so with no problems for the following 3 weeks.

This week I have actually learned a ton of information about tweeting.  I learned that educators can use twitter to grow their PLN, create positive PR about their class and learning experiences and also to teach positive digital citizenship in our digital world.

To grow my own professional learning network as a teacher I have learned how to connect with educators through @teaching with soul and @ Edutupia .  Educators share lessons and great activities with each other as well as feedback on how it worked in different classrooms.  Because I am a 4th grade teacher I checked out # 4thchat to get specific ideas that are for the 4th grade classroom.

Creating positive relations about my class and students is very appealing to me.  We all know there is a lot of negative things out on the web about education, students, and classrooms but if you were to get in front of this negative wave and use your class twitter account to let students tweet about the positive learning that is happening on a daily bases, other tweeters and parents will be able to see what the students are learning and doing throughout their day.  Just FYI, I am going to sit down with my principal after we have our STAAR testing and get approval for a classroom twitter account for my 4th grade class.

This leads into teaching my students responsible digital citizenship while handing social media.
Students have to understand that once they put anything out on the web it is there for all to see, so it needs to be positive and polite.  It can be taken down but that doesn't mean countless people may have already copied and shared it .  At this point they will have no control over it.  Words have a powerful impact and they can lift up your soul or break your heart.  Any social media user needs to understand and except the responsibility that goes with this endeavor.  As a teacher it will be my responsibility  to make sure all my students understand how to use social media in a positive way .