It wasn’t so long ago when the thought of me using Twitter on a regular basis was something I wouldn’t have considered as likely. At that point I considered Twitter as just another social media application, like Facebook, designed to allow people to post about what they had eaten last night (and I have a friend who does just that, insisting on photographing and posting any meal she has when at a restaurant, etc, prior to starting to eat), or for celebrities to show off, or in a number of cases embarrass themselves for the worlds media.
Then a colleague introduced me to the use of Twitter as a tool for professional learning and sharing teaching or other ideas around education with practitioners from around the world. That was around 6 month ago and I haven’t looked back since then. I have found myself regularly, and at stages daily, visiting twitter looking to see what ideas and discussions were out there. That said, most of my contributions to Twitter thus far have been in the form of retweets of tweets which I have considered useful, interesting, insightful or worth sharing.
So this blog entry marks my 1000th tweet. Not much when compared with veterans of twitter however for me it marks almost 1000 ideas, discussions or thoughts which, without twitter, I may not have had access to.
Thank you to all who have I have followed for the ideas you have provided and I look forward to further interactions with you. I intend to do as my colleague did for me, and encourage others to engage in using twitter for professional learning purposes. I also intend to contribute more of my own thoughts rather than just retweeting. If you are reading this, do you know of educators not using twitter and if so have you introduced them to the possibilities? How many professional development programmes can boast that they can provide as many, or as broad a range of, ideas as twitter can?
Keep tweeting, as I certainly will.
Technology and Learning