I have been thinking a great deal about the various social media trends that have developed in the past few years, and my involvement (or lack thereof) in them. My MET course this term has been about designing technology-supported media environments, and something that has been coming up a lot is the use of social media in the classroom. Before diving into this idea further, a bit of self-reflection was needed.
As far as social media goes, I am an avid Facebook and Pinterest user, and I love to blog (no kidding). That being said, I knew there were gaps in my social media literacy, and so I set out to do something about it. I decided to make a concentrated effort to explore more Twitter more thoroughly this month. To the outsider, to “tweet” seems like a very silly thing to do, letting everyone know what you are up to at any given point in time. This was my thought before I plunged into the twittersphere this month. I decided to really give it some time, and see if I found it enjoyable, or useful, or even worth the time and effort I was putting into it.
I began by creating my profile, which was challenging, as I had to keep it to a certain character count and I am bit long-winded. Then I looked for friends of mine with Twitter accounts, and was able to locate a few. I browsed their sites and got a feel for what individuals were doing with their twitter pages; some were using them for recipes and activities, others for their professional communities, others for interests. I decided that I would make my page a little bit of both, reflecting my multiple roles of teacher, student, mother, wife, techie geek, football enthusiast, environmentalist, Canadian patriot and baker extraordinaire.
I have been using it for only a few weeks now, and really for only a few days regularly, and these are my thoughts. First, if used wisely, I think that Twitter can be an excellent tool for getting information out to a wide community of people in a fast, efficient way. Second, it is a great hub of information for news feeds and professional communities, allowing me to check in with various sites with ease. Third, I quite enjoyed the idea that anyone out there might be able to see what I was tweeting about and perhaps consider it to be as important as I myself was deeming it to be. Finally, I found it quite addictive, and think that I have spent WAY too much time trying to follow everything as it is posted. Overall though, I think that I will enjoy using this tweeting tool, and I look forward to exploring the possibilities that this tool holds for me as a classroom teacher or online instructor… I have a feeling that the possibilities are endless.