I have been an avid “Tweeter” for several years in a personal capacity, but I had never given much thought into using Twitter to connect with other teachers. When I first embarked on this journey, I wanted to make sure I chose meaningful people and hashtags to follow. I first began by looking at some of the trending hashtags in Social Studies education, but a lot of the hashtags were geared more toward high school level studies and didn’t seem relevant to my learning. I eventually settled on #edtech (and also #edchat) because I really wanted to connect with others to see what they were talking about in response to education and technology. The first issue I ran into is that I didn’t know how to follow a hashtag, and I had never realized that before. Following people on Twitter is easy, but actually keeping track of the use of a hashtag was a skill that was beyond my Twitter knowledge.
That’s when I went to Tweetdeck, which I had never used before. I fell in love so quickly, because it is visually appealing and so easy to organize the content I wanted to keep tabs on. I really appreciated the planner-style layout that kept my notifications, hashtags, responses, and everything in between neatly organized in one location. This made the task of engaging with other educators less daunting, as it brought the educators to my virtual doorstep with the use of the hashtag. I found that I began following several accounts and engaging in several different conversations with educators from around the world. Sometimes these conversations would be deep, meaningful conversations, such as the one I had about what it means for students to have “access” to technology. Other conversations were lighter, more uplifting (such as why teachers feel like it’s necessary to wave at the end of a Zoom meeting). Regardless of the content of the conversations, I could feel myself becoming more empowered as a virtual learner myself, and I really started to grasp the idea of global collaboration.
Overall, I was shocked with the ease at which I fell into the Twitter community and opened up to strangers that shared a similar passion for teaching as myself. My biggest take-away from this is that global collaboration does not have to be scary or daunting. It doesn’t have to be joining in virtual PD and Zoom meetings, which in the past had turned me off because of the amount of effort and time it takes to orchestrate these events. I will carry on with checking my Twitter daily, peruse the conversations surrounding my favorite hashtags, and continue to build my global community of educators that have so much to offer me.
Comments