Twitter-chatter #Edtechchat

I had never heard of twitterchat until today. It's a shame. What a great communication device. I do believe that twitterchat is a great way for professional development. I came across a youtube video about President Obama and "The White House- Student Film Festival," I was amazed by Obamas' attempt to, within 5 years, demand technology in every classroom in the U.S. I would have never even heard of this unless I went on this twitterchat at this exact moment. I think that's incredible. How easy communication becomes. As a future teacher I could simply browse through all the posts and learn an extreme amount. I honestly never thought of twitter for this purpose until now. These chats can definitely broaden my horizons to future educating. I think because anyone is allowed to use the chat, the amount of information is endless. Twitterchat is a very simple way to find new information as a teacher, and also you do not have to even post anything if you don't want to. You can simply browse what other's have to offer, and possibly when you feel more comfortable sharing information you may do so. I also think the twitterchat is great because you never know what people will post. I came across a blog I had already seen, which I found to be ironic. I  really just think this chat can connect you to educators all over, which is important because each state, town, etc. is different. You can view others opinions and ideas in a second! Twitterchat is a nice way to develop your technology skills as an educator and keep update with new up and coming technology offered.

"Tweet-Tweet"

According to " 10 Amazing Ways For Teachers & Tutors To Use Twitter In Education" "Twitter like all other social media is a virtual Aladdin’s cave."This fits twitter to a "t." There is so much information a learner can receive from twitter, if the teacher takes the first steps. There are so many ways teachers can connect with their students using twitter. You can set up a 'classroom' hashtags around lessons and topics. This way the students can look back and keep a record of what was taught. "Hashtags also make it easy to follow interesting topics related to the curriculum or anything else that might broaden a student’s knowledge base." Twitter makes it easy for an after class discussion or if students need help they can get a hold of the teacher or their classmates for help! Language learners can begin to use BICS. There is no pressure to communicate "correctly" and hashtags keep everything together. I find twitter could be especially useful for intermediate ELLs to become familiar with English from a whole different perspective. Teachers can also use twitter as a bulletin board, interact with students parents, or even create a classroom newspaper. It genius!! I would love to able to communicate with my parents on a daily basis and that's easy. Teachers can easily tweet something that all the parents could see, or connect directly. My favorite idea I found was a history graduate posting events from WWII and it could become an interesting history project that brings things to life. You could pick all different events in history. It's a new way for learning.

According to an article called "How To Use (Internal) Microblogging For Education,"
"Microblogging is an outstanding technique for supervision."  You can encourage students to track their  activities in a microblog.  If students are posting information about their work, this creates more time for the teacher to participate in the students work and track their progress. We are all able to then stay connected! Teachers never seem to have enough time to really track each students progress, twitter could possibly make our lives a little easier. Possibly more time consuming, but we also would have a better grasp on each student as an individual learner. You can create microblogs for everything!