Twitter (Thing 9)

Ah, Twitter. I have loved Twitter since 2013 when it enabled me to connect directly with educators from around the world in my International Education graduate seminar. I had the privilege of learning from Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish educator and author of Finnish Lessons. (You can follow him on Twitter at @pasi_sahlberg.) 

In this TedxEast talk, he makes a lot of really great points and also opens with a joke that he told in class and I've been laughing about ever since.

Using a hashtag with our class course number, we had weekly discussions with prime ministers, ministers of education, global educators, professors at other universities, and countless other leaders in our field. This would have been impossible without social media in general and Twitter in particular. I would argue that it is the single most important connectivity tool that we have right now: it's easy to use, provides an instant connection, and allows you to learn from others with a single "follow" click.

Before taking that class, I wasn't really interested in using social media to learn. I had a personal Twitter but didn't use it that much - I mostly tweeted about reality TV and new restaurants. I didn't have that many followers, and almost no one that I knew in real life was on Twitter. But when I went back to school, a lot of things changed. I was able to be immersed full time in a community that supported and provided opportunities for continual learning, growth, and reflection, and Twitter seemed a natural outgrowth of that. It is one of the rare cases in my life where technology made everything better instantly and easily. We were encouraged to tweet in during class time using the class hashtag, and Pasi kept our hashtag live feed on a screen projected in the front so we could refer to it during our discussions. It provided a way for us to respond to the material in a timely way even if we didn't want to raise our hands or if the discussion had moved on before we got a chance to share. It also provided a way for other educators to join in our discussions even if they couldn't be there in person. We were able to talk about educational reform with world leaders without ever leaving our classroom. This was amazing to me!

Upon my reentry into teaching, I found almost immediately that it was impossible to maintain the energy and motivation to learn new things that I had rediscovered in grad school. There simply was not enough time to plan lessons, grade papers, attend meetings, continue my professional development, have an actual life, AND spend time on Twitter or other online teaching communities to keep up with what everyone else was doing. It was a rough welcome back, and I felt incredibly guilty that I was not giving my best to my students, colleagues, family, and friends. 

Once I readjusted, I realized that I could still maintain my Twitter learning, but it would be different from when I was a student. I had more responsibility again, and my continuing education would have to look different. I started by trying to make lists and categorize the people I followed, but I didn't really like that (I'll try it again, but the organization didn't really help me much). Then I tried to only follow people I knew would tweet about education, but I also wanted news and other information. The thing that really helped me organize my Twitter experience was hashtags and Twitter chats. Scholastic recently began their Summer Reading Summit conferences, and I have followed along from afar with the hashtag #readingsummit, gaining new resources and people to follow with every tweet.

The great thing about the hashtags is that the feed will show you all the activity from people using it: who followed whom, who retweeted what, etc. This gives me even more information and inspiration.

I also followed along with #ISTE2016 since several of my colleagues were there along with many of the educational gurus that I follow on Twitter: Jennie Magiera (@MsMagiera), Pernille Ripp (@pernilleripp), and Sylvia Duckworth (@sylviaduckworth), just to name a few. Even though I couldn't be in Colorado with them, I benefited from their learning because they would tweet out pictures, links, resources, and notes from their experience. All of this FOR FREE and FOR MY CLASSROOM USE! Amazing.

Finally, I learned about Teachers Write (#teacherswrite) this year from a retweet that led me to Aliza Werner (@alizateach), who is now one of my favorite people on Twitter. She is a prolific tweeter of excellent material - we first got into a conversation about book choice and how important it is for students - and through talking with her, I also got to connect with Donalyn Miller (@donalynbooks), author of The Book Whisperer, one of the best books I've ever read about matching students with books. This is an incredible personal and professional development opportunity for me as a writer and teacher of writing, and I've enjoyed the first week and am looking forward to more. Truthfully, I'm a little behind, but this has made me much more accountable for my own writing!

Over the past few weeks, I've followed many more people than I usually do because of my activity on Twitter. I've learned that you only get out of it what you put into it (like with most things) and so I've made a conscious effort to do more than scroll mindlessly. I followed Donalyn, Aliza, and Sylvia (usernames above) as well as Kate Messner (@KateMessner), an author who founded Teachers Write, Susan Cain (@susancain), the author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking (a book I loved and that changed my whole approach to teaching, especially since I am an extrovert), and Silvia Tolisano (@langwitches) who wrote this article from this week that I really liked. Craig Kemp (@mrkempnz) was in one of the related articles this week, and I saw that he did a lot of discussing specific issues with other teachers via hashtags, so I followed him too. There are many more, but you can go to my "following" list and check them out if you're really interested!

Here's Susan Cain's Ted Talk in case you haven't seen it (which I know is unrelated to this "thing" but I think everyone should see it):

I'm currently at 136 followers, which is definitely on the low end, but certainly better than when I started; a friend of mine from grad school who has his own educational consulting company is currently at 3,450 followers (Simon Townley, @The_Gorilla_LC) and used to say that when I retweeted him it was like "shouting into an empty room." The truth hurts sometimes.  :) I have picked up more followers pretty steadily - a few a week, usually - from following more people, tweeting more focused information and ideas about education, and participating in the Twitter chats. I can see how if I wanted to dedicate more time to this, I could "build my brand" on Twitter and other social media. I'm not into that for now - I'm just in it to learn more and connect with people I wouldn't otherwise get a chance to talk to. I also tried Hootsuite and Tweetdeck; I can see how they would be useful for that brand building, but for now, they're just fun to look at and see Twitter in a new way. They make it easier to see my interactions with people, and that's cool.

I could say a ton more about Twitter and how much it has helped me in my professional development, but this is probably long enough as it is. I'll say, in closing, that the program Elluminate came up in several articles and is probably worth exploring, and that this article about hashtag PD was very interesting. There's so much good stuff out there that will literally come to you if you let it!

P.S. I'm @_maggie_coyne_. Let's chat!

P.P.S. I forgot to mention that I liked learning about the link shorteners like Bitly because I often run out of characters when I'm tweeting and I refuse to shorten my words into textspeak like 2 or ur, but it's SO frustrating to have those shortened links blocked at school! Often, I'll try to click on an article that is related to what I'm teaching only to find that I can't get to the resource because it uses a link shortener. Is there any way around this?