Learning How to Tweet and Other Twitter Adventures!

Okay, so this week has been full of technology for me. To be honest, a lot of that has been Pokemon Go. However, the timing for setting up a Twitter account could not have been more perfect in that respect. I promise I haven't just been using Twitter to brush up my Pokemon skills, but I can't lie and say I haven't searched for accounts to follow. (If any of you are playing, I would follow PokemonGoHub). If you're not playing, I recommend it. Your students probably will still be playing in August! It's a great way to get out of the house, exercise, and make new friends (even if we're all a little nerdy).
When I first created my Twitter account, I started searching for Science feeds to follow. I am most excited to create a PLN in general so that I can be up to date with what new research has emerged in Biology, and there are tons of Twitter feeds devoted to research and discoveries in the field. These two sites gave me some pretty good feeds to follow:
Buzzfeed's List for Science Nerds
More Science Related Feeds
I spent a lot of time just researching science feeds to follow. Those were pretty easy to find, and I found I could follow lots of people and organizations that I wanted to hear from. In the reading, the authors mentioned a technology coordinator who loved Twitter because he could get advice and information from people whose feedback he valued (Solomon & Schrum, 2014); I get that sentiment. The neat thing about Twitter is that you can be very focused on what kind of information you are exposed to so you're not bombarded with information you don't care to hear.  I liked that I could quickly find and have access to current ideas and research in Biology. And I'm not just getting to hear from organizations, but I realized yesterday that a lady I followed because she tweeted about modern extinction was actually the author of a book I'd read on the topic. (How cool is that? Yes, I did search for J.K. Rowling next).
However, it has been really difficult for me to break into the educational side of Twitter. I took a look at the wiki Twitter4Teachers, and there are a ton of user accounts to sort through. They even have a short description of each user. But, it's still just way overwhelming for me. I have followed many people from the field of Education, but I find that I'm pickier when looking for educational information. For instance, there are lots of elementary twitter users for science (which is awesome if you teach elementary!), but I want to make sure to find feeds that can help enhance my classroom, so those aren't really appropriate for me. I found some cool feeds to follow from EducationWorld and tried to focus my searches more towards science teacher feeds or educational technology feeds.
So finding people to follow has been a lot of fun and sometimes frustrating, but actually beginning to use Twitter has also been an experience.
The reading gave some good general information on how to make this process go more smoothly. I've been pretty okay with the idea of re-tweeting, but less okay with coming up with my own original tweets. I know that the tweets should be adding value, so the first tweet I did (besides the welcome) was my source for finding education feeds to follow. I was able to use TinyUrl to shorten my url, and include the class hashtag.
Hashtags are really very cool. It helps to streamline all the information for a topic, and then we can even use that hashtag to have a chat. I also liked in the reading that it emphasized that a hashtag on twitter creates a pretty powerful search engine because you can be very specific (as long as the hashtag already exists). I just quickly searched #blacklivesmatter just to see what Twitter pulled up. I think a search like this could be awesome in a History classroom. The BLM movement is at the forefront of news today, so I think students could benefit by quickly seeing updated news and the various opinions that exists out there.I think, in the future, I will be searching using hashtags to follow more educators who are posting about the things I want more information on.
The last component of Twitter I explored was TweetDeck. I don't really understand TweetDeck. I remember being really excited about reading about it last week because it sounded like it would really revolutionize the organization of my tweets, but so far it just looks like a different way to view notifications. I guess if I had another Twitter account, it would help me view the two at the same time? The only other application I've found so far that I appreciate is that I can filter the columns. I like that because I can create a column for feeds I want to see exclusively and then view multiple feeds side by side.
I did find this resource for help with TweetDeck. It's just the Twitter Support site, but it walks you through how to make changes to your TweetDeck.
Well, I gotta go "catch 'em all!", but if you want to follow me on Twitter my username is aprilmurdock00.

References

Solomon, G., & Schrum, L. (n.d.). Web 2.0 how-to for educators (2nd ed.).