Wednesday, March 21, 2012

understanding the value of Twitter

I created a Twitter account a few years ago to jump on the bandwagon hype when all the celebrities seemed to be competing for the most followers. After only a few weeks, I quit using it. In my busy life, I didn't see the value of checking in on the silly details of what Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, and NKOTB were up to.

I will be honest and say that when I saw Twitter was going to be a part of this class, I had my doubts. My only experience was the celebrity world of tweets and I wasn't sure what the value would be. When I logged back into my account, I first "unfollowed" almost everyone on my list. After visiting the twitter4teachers I was able to find other educators to follow that were active tweeters. It was easy to decide who to follow-and who not to follow- by looking in the top left corner of their homepage to see how many tweets they have created, and to scan through their recent tweets to see if the topics were of interest to me. If I found someone really helpful, I also looked at who they were following and who was following them to expand my network. I have also gone back to some of my favorite blogs to see if any of them have a Twitter link and I follow them there too.

In a search for more Twitter help, I came across a post from this blog http://www.thelandscapeoflearning.com/. Now I am following him.

Now my goal is to find the balance. I have already found myself spending a lot of time on my Twitter feed clicking links and finding more people to follow. Since I am on spring break, I have the time right now to get comfortable. I will have to take the advice from our earlier reading-set a time limit for myself...and don't feel like I have to read EVERYthing.

5 comments:

  1. Heather,
    Thank you for the great resource. I too have been spending a large portion of my time engrossed in clicking links and investigating the possibilities of Twitter. I think, (hope!) the process will become smoother as time progresses. I do think it is important to set some sort of time limit for any of the tools we have discussed. In a global community, there is no way to follow every single post, comment, or tweet.
    Enjoy what is left of your spring break!

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  2. Hi Heather. Right now I have to force myself to go to my twitter account. Not much need to limit my time there. Thanks for the resources. I've been looking a lot too trying to find just the right people to follow. Twitter4teachers was helpful. I reminded myself after a couple of days of watching the tweets that were posted that I can always "unfollow" someone.

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  3. I think that the twitter for teachers website has been my biggest friend so far. I have found lots of people to follow. After following a few I checked who they followed and followed some of those people. I too always thought twitter was mainly used for following celebrities and the like. Thanks to one of your tweets I am going to be using the do nothing for 2 minutes website. I am now beginning to see all of the benefits to twitter and I am looking forward to continue to use it.

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  4. That was a good blog post with some helpful information. You are going to be learning about Twitter hashtags more next week. Here is the direct link to the Twitter blog post for others -- http://www.thelandscapeoflearning.com/2012/03/twitter-tweet-sheet-tips-and-tricks-and.html

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  5. I too have been spending a lot of time on Twitter. It took me awhile to find people that were "worth" following. I found a lot of librarians on the wiki, but noticed a lot of them only had a few tweets, so I chose not to follow them. I do like Tweetdeck because it allows you to see Tweets and Facebook posts all at the same time. So this has been a helpful tool for me.

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