Twitter Talk...

For my audience that are frequent flyers, you may recall my post last week regarding Reddit's involvement with education. This week I decided to take my focus and aim it towards another social media platform, Twitter. Prior to Bret's visit to my education class, I never would have thought Twitter's platform could hold a productive and progressive discussion regarding education. My assumption was that any discussion would be taken over by avatar-less twitter mongers that permanently yell passive aggressive messages into their computer. Then I realized I'm not dealing with politics, and found some good things with education on twitter. The specific hashtags that I did some research with were #EdChat, #EdLeaders, #Edu, #Education and #Educhat.

Before I delve into the positives, I feel it is important to note that through sifting, I found a healthy amount of self-promotion and blanket, overused, motivational quotes. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of quotes that have significant meaning and truth, however, I felt overwhelmed with the amount I saw.

Moving on, I did see productive conversation. Some of the best discussions I saw was when it was a side conversation to a main post. I felt like a fly on the wall to teachers discussing struggles, or successes that they were dealing with in the classroom. Additionally, I felt there was a high presence of scholarly articles posted from users. While Reddit seemed to be more of a forum, Twitter saw frequent use of sharing informational articles which I personally really enjoyed seeing.

Touching back to my description before, I felt I saw a lot of this type of post in my search. It was self-promotion mixed with productive information that can be used by teachers. The link takes you to his blog, but the information is beneficial. Finding a happy medium between what is productive, and what is simply self-promotion is an important skill when surfing twitter as a teacher looking for additional resources and outlets.

Similar to Reddit, there were a number of posts that allowed teachers to express how they felt. One draw back for twitter is the lack of anonymity, unless you use a burner account of course. Another draw back is the 140 character limit. Some teachers were forced to use multiple posts to express one thought. Now although this seems like trivial details to critique, I wonder how many teachers decided to limit their thoughts in a post to one tweet because of that reason. In reddit, teachers can let all of their thoughts and feelings go without having to worry about either drawback I mentioned.

Overall, I feel much more comfortable with using Twitter and would suggest other teachers to use it as resource to browse and interact with but would not use as an end all be all. Pick apart the important details, interact with other teachers and then move on to other resources that might provide more rich content on a consistent basis.

Thanks for reading!