Thing 2: Twitter and Other Online Communities (Thing 3)

I have been a member of Twitter for a while, but haven't really explored it much until the other day when we had a huge windstorm and I wanted to see updates about the storm, so I started exploring different handles and hashtags. My school related connection to Twitter started this past summer when our department had a technology day at a conference for administrators. Some teachers I know have been using Twitter to reach out to children's authors and other figures for classroom connections. Up until now it has felt a little like "one more thing" for me to try keep up with, but I am starting to feel the ways it can enhance my learning, so I am lurking more and more. For this assignment I explored some hashtags- slscooltools and edchat. I quickly went down a rabbit hole about 150 Chrome Apps and Extensions. I was really happy to see that I was already familiar with many of the suggestions on the blog. I like how I was able to filter the 150 by grade levels. I also found an interesting poster about differentiation. My favorite feature to come out of my exploration of Twitter today was the 3 Fast, Free Lesson Plans to Fight Fake News. I am finding fake news to be more and more of an issue. I don't click on much in Facebook anymore because so much of it has the potential to be fake (not too mention that it can really raise a person's blood pressure). I work with several classes of students in 5th and 6th grade and I think they would enjoy learning how to vet information and sources. I think we owe it to the students to help them learn about this now since they get so much information through their phones and tablets. We need to help them learn to navigate the posts and headlines so they can develop their ability to determine fact from distraction. I am going to continue to explore Twitter for professional connections and ideas for teaching. I think I am going to go through and search for my favorite writers and thinkers out there so I can start to get some daily inspiration. I also plan to use Twitter to help teachers reach out to more people for possible hangouts with their students. Who knows, maybe I'll even try tweetchat. My main concern is how to keep all of the tweets organized. How are others organizing their Twitter feed?