To tweet or not to tweet

Topics we're learning about so far in our summer classes: Concept mapping, educational research, Bloom's taxonomy, NCLB and other educational reforms, Twitter.

Topics I understand and feel comfortable with: Twitter.

Finally, something I feel like I already know. Something that isn't brand new and isn't over my head. I am a Twitter expert...at least in my head. I tweet multiple times a day and most of my tweets contain at least one hashtag. While doing the reading for this week, I kind of got that pretentious attitude like "Pshh...I already know ALLLL this stuff *yawn*". But now that I think about it more - I'm an expert at Twitter for personal use, but most definitely not for use in the classroom. I realize that I still have things to learn on how to make Twitter appropriate and productive for classroom use. I need to extend my Twitter use beyond using it to just share my thoughts and daily activities and following my friends - I need to learn how to use Twitter to learn.

I think the idea of a PLN is really cool and I like the fact that Twitter can expand "the classroom" beyond the four walls of the actual classroom. I like the idea of having access to your students outside of class (and them having access to you), and although this can be done with email or instant messaging, I think Twitter is appealing because it allows instant access to everyone you're following. Instead of sending 25 separate messages, you can send one tweet and all of your students can reply and have their replies seen by everyone.

One final thing about Twitter that I particularly like is that it forces you to be concise. With only 140 characters per tweet, tweeting is a good exercise in learning how to say what you need to and make sense in as few words as possible. ...which is obviously not what I have done here.

Anyway, I'm excited to learn how to use Twitter, something that I use so often and love using, in teaching.