Education ∪ Math ∪ Technology

Tag: Twitter (page 2 of 2)

How my PLN helped me yesterday

Yesterday I posted a question on Twitter.  It was a pretty simple one, I was looking for examples of portfolios people have created because I needed to find an example to analyze as part of one of my graduate courses.

Within 10 minutes, I had a bunch of different examples from different people in my Professional Learning Network (PLN).  Here are their tweets (these images link to their examples).

All of these portfolios would have worked for my purpose, but it was great to ask a question of my PLN that I could never answer easily with a regular search engine.  I also know that these are examples that people wanted to share, which suggests that they are exemplars which makes it even more useful to me, since I want to eventually produce an exemplar of a portfolio for myself (although I suspect that may end up just being a subset of what I have posted on this blog).

 

Really interesting conversation on #edchat on Twitter

I participated for the first time a couple of days ago in this #edchat phenomena happening on Twitter.  Basically the idea is, everyone heads to the search page on Twitter and starts having a conversation through Twitter using the hashtag #edchat.  The resulting conversation is recorded and has many people who can listen in on the conversation, and everyone is free to jump in if they want.

The Wordle (created on http://www.wordle.net) below is the result of our conversation topic – motivating students.  

Wordle

The reason why we used Twitter for our conversation is less obvious I suppose.  We could have had a similar conversation using forum software or one giant chat, but both of these have drawbacks.  First, a forum is an asynchronous form of communication with significant delay between comments.  Twitter is a much faster mode of communication, and the ability to refresh to see more results in the search engine makes using Twitter closer to a real conversation speed.  Twitter beats a chat application largely because you can follow the participants of the Twitter chat after the conversation, and a permanent(ish) record of the conversation continues to exist on Twitter for other people to find (and possible join!).

This conversation was fun and engaging and involved over 110 participants and over 800 comments made.  That’s pretty impressive, and definitely shows me that Twitter is a very useful tool for personal professional development and collaboration.  When was the last time you had such an organized conversation with so many people?