Twitter

@justintarte:

Dr. Justin Tarte is the man who made the video on Twitter and education. If you couldn’t tell that he was passionate about using Twitter in Education in the video, his Twitter definitely reflects his passion. My Twitter feed is mostly made up of his tweets because he tweets a few times every hour! He has a ton of useful resources and articles that he shares. Although they are great links, it gets a bit repetitive since he posts them so much. I find myself scrolling past his tweets now, instead of reading all of them, because I don’t have time. One of my favorite tweets from Justin Tarte was a bar graph comparing the amount of spending on higher education, K-12, and corrections. I had never seen the spending displayed in such a way that it left me in shock and frustration.

@couros

Technology educator, Alec Couros is very active on Twitter as well. I really enjoy following Alec because he tweets a wide variety of topics. He’ll tweet a link about current happenings in the field of education, then tweet a funny survey an hour later. He seems to use a lot of relevant comedy in his classroom. He also tweets quite a bit about recent global and political news. One of my favorite tweets from Alec was a link to “Thug Notes.” It has crude, but hilarious summaries of literary classics. Clean versions of these videos would be great to use in a high school English class.

@shannoninottawa

Shannon Smith is a seventh and eighth grade principal in Ottawa, Canada. Shannon barely tweeted during the past month or so that I have been following her. The few times she did tweet, they were retweets from other educators. They had links to interesting articles but I would have liked to see some of her own opinions come up in my Twitter feed. Looking through her past tweets, I really enjoyed reading an article she tweeted about over the summer. It asks a question I often wonder about, as a future science teacher, “Where has our Childrens’ Thrill of Discovery Gone?” The article reports, “We have learned from attitude surveys that when students are younger they have great interest in science. As they get older, however, science is seen more as 'complicated' and 'difficult,' as one

survey said, versus 'fun' or 'inspiring.'  Though this is a devastating reality, it motivates me to continue having fun and inspiring lessons in my science classes.

@Dwight_Carter:

Dwight Carter is a high school principal in New Albany. Following his twitter is very encouraging. He sometimes tweets about articles concerning education but he mostly tweets motivational quotes or graphics. He adds #BeGreat at the end of most of his tweets. He truly believes that greatness is a choice you can make. He really seems to care about his students and others. I would love to have such an encouraging principal. Such optimism and hopefulness is rare in the high school setting. One of my favorite tweets from him spoke so much truth and accurately reflects the apathetic attitudes of high schoolers.

@CI350Class

The class Twitter, facilitated by none other than Dr. Harold Blanco himself, is filled with recent news and educational articles. I enjoy following it because I am bad about keeping up with the news, so I get small doses of it through the class Twitter. The educational articles are also useful and obviously relevant to education majors. One of my favorite tweets was a link to “5 Ways to Become More

Comfortable with Technology in your Classroom.” Although this class has definitely provided me with plenty of new skills and tools to using technology in the classroom, this article gives practical tips for when I actually do start using technology in my own classroom.