Thing # 18

     I already have a Twitter account.  I love using it to keep up to date with all of my friends, shows, and news.  My account is set to private so that only people who are following me can read my tweets and I have to approve of my followers, but here is a link to my Twitter account.  I kept my name as Rachel Hannabass because I wanted it to be easy for my friends to find me and I think that twitter is pretty secure.

     I looked up the #edtech hashtag and these are some of the tweets that I found about it.

     I think it was interesting to see the variety of people that were using this hastag and the different news sources and information that it led to.  Way more people were using educational hashtags than I expected and I hope that I can use some soon.  I liked the hastag search because it was easy and showed a variety of results.  The only thing I did not like is that it shows all results regardless of quality or relevance.

     It is important for educators to understand social networking sites because they can be very useful tools once they are properly understood and used.  I follow several education based organizations now such as The Tennessee Board of Education and it is useful to see the different thing that they post.  Twitter is an excellent way to stay on top of hot topics in education and tags can be used as a way to get in a conversation with other educators.
     
     The new insight I gained about twitter was that it can be used for way more than just social fun and following your friends and yes celebrities.  It can be used to stay up to date with what is popular in education and if anything controversial is happening in the area.

     There are many school applications for a social networking site like this.  Teachers can use it to follow one another.  A teacher could even start a twitter page that their students could follow.  It could talk about up coming tests and what assignments occurred in class.  This would also be a good way for parents to get involved with their students academics.  They could see that a test is coming up and help their student study.