Twitter: The Final Frontier

These are the voyages of the pre-service teacher.  Her continuing mission: to explore strange new social networks.  To seek out new communities and build a personal learning network.  To boldly go where no internet hermit has gone before...

As a teacher-to-be and technical neophyte, I have a lot to learn about teaching high school classes, and also about using technology, both in general and specifically in the classroom.  While I have a Facebook account in order to keep up with friends and family, I have flatly refused to get involved with Twitter or Google+ until now, as I thought them both a complete waste of time.  Why oh why would I want to know what the whole world is up to every minute of the day?  I can barely organize myself through my own day without trying to stay on top of everyone else's activities.  However, since I am now learning about various technologies and services, and how they can benefit me in my professional life, I am trying to make an effort to catch up with the rest of the world and get connected.

As part of my course on technology in education, I had to complete a challenge to get connected.  In my case, I was challenged to create a Twitter account and find at least twenty people to follow.

Alrighty then.

Before I started, I was instructed to read this reassuring and helpful blog post to point me in the right direction and help me get connected to a network of helpful colleagues.  This proved to be an excellent resource, as it pointed out some specific places I could look to find teachers on Twitter (like here) and useful hashtags to follow (like these)

After a bit of searching and browsing, I managed to find 20 people or organizations to follow, who seem to be pretty active and informative.  Now my Twitter looks like this:

I even (re)Tweeted my first Tweet!

English teachers are hilarious.

I was surprised to find that within an hour of setting up my account and following some people, others started to follow me!  I wish them luck with that - they will most likely get nothing but grammar puns from me.

Now that my account is established and I am following a few people and some hashtags, the next step is to continue to build my personal learning network and explore the ways Twitter can connect me to people and resources, to provide help and inspiration in times of classroom stress, and to generally keep me up to date with the connected worlds of technology and education.  While I haven't used Twitter to its full potential yet, I expect that it will become an invaluable tool as I journey toward managing my own classroom.