Michael_ncsu_bme: PLN's and Twitter

Personal Learning Networks (PLN) is the collection of people with whom you engage and share information with. These networks can consist of peers within your school as well as people that you interact with on social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook. It is important for teachers to be engaged in PLN's to be able to share and learn of new ideas pertaining to their profession, content area, and new strategies to best engage students and incorporate new activities into their classroom. Some new teachers may be unaware of how to become involved in PLN's outside of their local school. There are many resources such as this site that inform teachers of ways to become involved in PLN's. Twitter has become a very useful tool in staying connected to PLN's across the U.S. and around the globe. Just as twitter is useful to teachers, it can be useful to students both inside and outside the classroom if implemented correctly by teachers. Some of the ways that teachers can use twitter in the class is by creating a twitter chat during class to discuss a lesson or current topic with students tweeting their responses. Students can also tweet links to useful sites as resources for their fellow students to use. Students can also follow important people as they pertain to their class such as a Marketing executive or business CEO for business and marketing education. I personally have not had any teachers that have integrated twitter in my classes but have been introduced to methods and examples of how to implement them in a current class I am taking.

Being introduced to using twitter in education has also led to me taking part in my first twitter chat. I participated in #edtechchat. It was a very fast paced hour with a continuous flow of tweets. I did see a few good resources and thought provoking tweets but the chat was so fast that it was very difficult to keep up with all the tweets and retweets. Overall I think that particular chat was too full and flooded with tweets to be able to take anything worth while away from it as a whole.

As a teacher I do not think I would use twitter in my classroom. There are so many other tools available that are more student friendly and that do not require students to create accounts that can be linked to inappropriate content online. As far as developing PLN's I do see how twitter can be useful and can lead to more ways of connecting to PLN's in your local area as well as across the U.S.