Week 5- Tweeting on Twitter

I was super excited for this week because Twitter is one of my favourite forms of social media – I already use it on a daily basis, and find it really useful! I decided for my own educational benefit, I would create a brand new Twitter account simply because my more personal account I have had since grade 11, and although it definitely has been beneficial to my PLN, I wanted to give myself the opportunity for a fresh start with a more educational purpose in mind.

As I explored Twitter, I learned things about it that, as a fairly avid user, I  was surprised I did not already know. I learned about the discussions that take place on Twitter on a regular basis that anyone can participate in and read just by the use of a chat-designated hashtag. This is really cool not only from an educational standpoint, but from a personal standpoint too since I can take part in conversations about interests I may have. Since I’m in a Business degree and will soon be joining the business work-world, various discussions on topics like marketing, consumer behaviour or world economies on Twitter will be very beneficial for me to take part in.

With that being said, I definitely think Twitter is useful for educational activities. It is easy to search topics and hashtags and have lots of relevant information be at your fingertips in seconds. Twitter is also more or less my daily newspaper. I follow various news accounts that help me stay up to date on both a local and global level with just a few quick scrolls of my twitter feed during my breakfast every morning!

Since Twitter has already been such a valuable tool to me, it is already part of my PLE. In my week two reflection post, I included Twitter under the ‘collaborate/connect’ section of my PLE, however, I have come to realize that it could also be included under my ‘research’ section as well – it really is a multifunctional tool!

This week’s lesson on PLN’s and the use of Twitter has allowed me to further understand digital literacy and digital citizenship in the sense that you get out of it what you put in to it. By this I mean the more you contribute digitally and understand the use of different tools, the more you will reap the benefits. Since Twitter is an example of a tool I regularly put effort into, I see the rewards in the greater wealth of general knowledge I possess just from scrolling through Twitter.

If you’re not already a Twitter user, I strongly suggest you check out this Anatomy of Twitter Lingo article and sign up for an account!

Merdzan, C. (CC) 2016.

This week’s interesting Feedly find…

This week when I opened up my Feedly reader, I was immediately drawn to an article called How High Are the Standards. It discussed a little bit about how students are held to such ‘high standards’ and teachers have such high expectations, but the term high standards is actually pretty meaningless – what exactly are ‘high standards’? The article suggests that students all strive to achieve more and head in the direction towards a single point, but how do we really know when we’ve gotten there? 

Peter Greene suggests within his article that yes we should obviously demonstrate to students that they should always try to be the best they can be (I have heard this countless times during my career as a student and I definitely agree that we should all strive to reach this) but setting ‘high standards’ that have no true meaning doesn’t help anyone get anywhere. Great read!!