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Professional Development With Twitter and 'Twitter Chat':                       (MOD#6 P1)

     The Twitter chat that I participated in was the Educational Technology Chat or #edtechchat. I chose this one because, not only did it start at a good time for me, but also it is extremely relevant to the LAI 590 class. Before I get into the details of the Twitter Chat and of how I believe it can be beneficial to professional development, I would like to share an event of how Twitter itself has been beneficial to me as an educator after just only a few days of signing up for the website. When I was looking for 10 educators/ microbloggers in my are of study to follow, I found it very difficult because there are not many 'Korean as a Foreign Language (KFL)' teachers out there to connect with, so I tried a bit harder. I found "The Modern Language Teachers Association of Queensland Inc. (MLTAQ)" on Twitter and saw that they represent teachers of a number of different foreign languages including Korean in Australia. I tweeted on their Twitter page, looking to connect to other KFL teachers.

They sent me a message back a few hours later telling me to Email them.


I emailed them and they connected me with KFL teachers in Australia that I can network with. If that isn't amazing, I don't know what is. This made me feel like a real digital citizen. Being able to connect with other teachers like this, teachers who are half way around the planet, to exchange ideas with and learn from is absolutely amazing. All I did was just send out one simple tweet.

     In regards to the Twitter Chat, there were a lot more people on there participating than I expected to see. There was one moderator who asked question to start up the conversation about educational technology. The questions were quite tough and some people had really smart responses. I did respond to one of the questions:


     I then got a comment and some likes on my response. Getting feedback on my answer made me feel like I was actually contributing to the Twitter Chat. I replied to other comments, and 'liked' some that I found interested all while others were responding to my reply and liking it. With all of the questions and responses, and having people 'liking' your comments, the Twitter Chat felt like an active community. It felt like I was a part of a team. Also, it was interesting to see what people had to say. This really goes against the rhetoric of
"Teachers don't do anything; they just collect money from hard working tax payers." You could really see that the people on this Twitter Chat enjoyed and cared about teaching, and want to become better at it to help their students.

     I think this is a great form for professional development. It allows one to connect with a lot of other educators, many of whom may be in the same field. Also, it also allows you to see the ideas that other educators have as well as share your own educational ideas with others, such as a tweet I responded to about someone wanting to use a green-screen in her classroom. This is what professional development is all about. It was a community of educators coming together to learn more from each other to become better teachers. I will try to participate in these Twitter Chats more and see what new ideas I can gain and new teachers I can connect with.

Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 17, 2017 at 8:00 PM

    I am really excited about the experience you had with the KFL teachers! How cool is that? I really like that you dug deep to find what you were looking for. What a great payoff.

    ReplyDelete

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