Weekly Report & Reflection blog post #5

 

Week 5 has been a lot of fun especially because I was able to use tools within my PLE to engage in my learning for this course.  I have been using Twitter for a short while now and I also have the mobile app, which is a great way of staying connected.   People use it for various purposes, but it appears to have many benefits for education.  50 Plus Tips on How To Use Twitter in Your, a blog post I came across in my Feedly reader, shares several ways in which Twitter can be used in the classroom.  

http://siliconangle.com/files/2012/03/Using-Twitter-for-business-282x300.jpgn

It was great that our Professor created a hashtag for us to tweet ideas, insights, links and basically anything we have learned and experienced in this course to share with our peers. The important thing to note when using Twitter or any other social media tool for that matter, is that we are all digital citizens; we need to respect others' time and share something that's going to be value to them.    

I am a strong believer in collaborative and social learning; knowledge grows when it is shared with others.  It does not stop to amaze me how much information is on the web, and the rate at which information is being generated.  There is so much to filter from when having to do my own research.  The value I have found by using Twitter is that I have learned a great deal from the people I follow as they have shared some valuable resources that have influenced my work.

Twitter has come to play a unique role in my PLE/PLN as it has become a platform for my professional development.  I have access to the collective knowledge of my PLN.  Additionally, due to the fact that Twitter is an open and public space, it creates opportunities for others outside of my PLN to actively make insightful contributions.

Tool integration, what a great concept! I have just learned that we can “save our favorite” tweets to Diigo, a social bookmarking tool we learned about last week where we can highlight and annotate digital resources.  In the educational context, this can be very beneficial for both students and educators when engaging in research.  In addition to individually researching scholarly articles, we could be “tweeted” valuable information that could influence the purpose of our research.   These resources, if saved as a favorite on Twitter, can then be automatically bookmarked to our Diigo accounts.

I am looking forward to exploring more tools in the weeks to follow.  My initial concern about using various social media tools was “how do I manage it all”?  Thanks to Hootsuite, I will have a dashboard to manage my social media networks!