Twitterthon Review

I actually found this assignment quite daunting and difficult. Finding 50 people per day to follow was incredibly difficult, especially when trying to find legitimate educational resources. But what I found most daunting was the idea to keep up with this information. In fact, it was information overload.

I had many people whom I followed, follow me back, and I also had random others that seemed to have no connection at all to my theme follow me. Many marketing people and "brand managers," whose purpose I know not decided that I was the kind of person that would give them great information via Twitter. I assure you, I retweet information that I find interesting and relevant, but my original content comes very few and far between.

The immense amount of information that is available via twitter now is overwhelming. Following so many people, I feel that I'm probably missing some, but then again, not following them meant that I was definitely missing that information. For instance, the U.S. News Education twitter feed posted a link to study that says "reading literature is a natural way to broaden vocabulary and improve SAT results." Now, I thought this was common sense. I teach context clues in depth to my high schoolers, but when I got to think about it, I believe that people still think we learn our vocabulary the way you learned how to spell--by memorizing words. When I retweeted this, I thought of my students, and hopefully some of them saw that quote because learning new vocabulary is only one of the many bonuses of reading.

Many times, I watched interactions between educators or educational strategists on a given topic. It usually revolved around the current political climate--school vouchers, school choice, weapons/security in schools. Many kept their dialogue civil, but some became so frustrated that it became a middle school-esque battle of the minds. When watching these, I thought it would be interesting to join the conversation, but I was afraid that I didn't know enough on the subject or that I would be attacked like I was watching happen. Mostly, it was fear of not knowing enough. All of the sudden, I was the kid in the classroom who didn't want to raise her hand for fear of looking stupid to the rest of her classmates.

From this, I'm really hoping to just learn from other people who are smarter than I am. Hopefully seeing posts and linked articles will enable me to learn more about the best practices of my profession and make me a better educator all around.