I have been a fairly active member of Twitter for the past year. While I first set out to use Twitter from a purely social perspective, it has turned into something very different. Rather than using it to stay current on the latest trends in Hollywood or random thoughts while my friends are walking their dogs, I use Twitter to sharpen my professional skills and stay abreast of the latest developments and ideas in the education industry. This week’s assignment from Discovery Ed/Wilkes pushed me (in a good way) to another level. Here are my thoughts from Twitterthon 2013!
The Quota: While I am not exactly sure if I hit the magic number of 50 new “followees” per day, forcing myself to follow as many people in a day as possible was a worthy exercise nonetheless. Tactically, I was somewhat strategic in who I picked. I typically focused on anyone involved in what I like to call the “PBL revolution”. I am a firm believer in this paradigm of teaching and learning; therefore, my radar was super sensitive towards these individuals.
One of the easiest ways to do this was to tap into some of the forward thinking individuals on one of “chats” I am involved with on Tweetdeck (i.e. #@PBLchat), or pull up a person who is heavily known in the PBL world, and follow some of the people he/she is following.
My Tweets: Many of the people I follow on Twitter fire off several tweets per-minute. With that, I figured the process of sending out 6 Tweets per day was certainly manageable. Would I typically tweet this many times in a day? Probably not, but it certainly gets you into a certain type of habit and rhythm, that almost becomes addictive. Once I got started, the process became more and more natural. I was either firing off tweets with links to something interested I just read or reporting out on the latest educational strategies/accomplishments within my district. It is always great to see one of your tweets reposted by someone in the edtech world you respect; thanks @joshuakoen! On another occasion, I posed a question into the world of PBL. It was great to have that tweet reposted by one of the hallmark organizations within the PBL world, New Tech Network. Here’s the retweet:
RT @AdamPizzi "Anyone have a good PBL idea for World History class covering Renaissance? #PBLChat"#sschat
Final Thoughts:
Overall, it was a great week spent within the Twitterthon challenge. I established some excellent contacts and connections within my professional world. I was able to share and further articulate some best practices taking shape within my district (AdamPizzi22 Nov Proud of Mrs. Pizzi & her 9th pd AP Gov n Pol class for putting together excellent pol party commercials using iPads and We Video #PBLChat). And, I was even sent some resources upon request; thank you New Tech Network! My role on Twitter had expanded and I will certainly look to continue to leverage the power of this social media tool.