My Random Keys

Dear Mr Costolo,

I've been out of the classroom now for about 5 years and don't get a "Summer Vacation" anymore. It was okay at first, but now that the kids are older, I wish I had a big ole summer again.  But now, thanks to the school district's energy saving program, full-year employees work 10 hour days during July and get each Friday off.  I'm really starting to like that!

There's never enough time to get all of that stuff done around the house.  Now, with No Work Fridays, I can sleep in and not do that stuff until next week because I wanted to play today.  Probably not listed in that 7 Habits of Deadly Productive People book, but it's working for me today.

This morning, my phone started beeping at sunrise. (Seems the battery going out was perfectly timed with the sun.) After laying there for a bit, I saw I had a message and checked it.  That led to the discovery of an interesting string of posts in FaceBook.  Pulling out the iPad, which was nearby already, I opened up Flipboard to quickly scan these interesting and I-can't-wait-another-minute-not-knowing-your-innermost-thoughts posts.  I learned a lot from Twitter and FBook, actually.  The iPad was handling the feeds quite well until I realized that one feed wasn't working. Twenty feet away, the laptop was sitting waiting to fix that flash-based error and I was off to the races updating other feeds.

Sleeping-in today took the form of several hours of personal and work online reading and doing using three different devices and three different OS's.  Yeah, I miss Summer Vacation again.

http://tinyurl.com/3cuzoz8

Admittedly, I'm not a Twitter Pro. I started the account on July 19, 2007 during a Discovery Educator Network (DEN) gathering. At the time, it was only "I'm eating a PB&J" or "just brushed my teeth" feed of information for me. I wasn't impressed.  A year later, Steve Dembo enthusiastically shared Twitter with a group of DEN Leadership Council members as a way to enhance our professional learning network. We spent time right then following each other before we went back to our respective states.  It has been a valuable since then.

There are many great teachers who use Twitter to communicate questions, answers, and resources with other like-minded teachers. No teacher is an island with an effective Twitter stream.  If you wisely choose those who you wish to follow, you can learn much from experience teachers who have already traveled down the road you may be starting.

My biggest tip is to find an educational leader that you respect and see who they follow. One can mostly avoid blind searching for professional leadership if you know that those you respect may have already vetted the authenticity or usefulness of those that they follow. Unfortunately, it also opens you up to certain education leaders who spend 80% of their time tweeting about where they ate BBQ or their latest golf score and 20% of their tweets are actually useful.

A recent article was published by Education Next giving a list of the top 25 Education Tweeters and policy makers. I was glad to know that I was already following a number of them, but found some new ones I may soon add. If you are wanting to pad your PLN, check out some of these names. (Good bets: Wesley Fryer, Steve Dembo, Ewan McIntosh, and Vicki Davis just as starters.)

There are a number of 'How To Twitter in Education' blogs out there, so I won't attempt to recreate the wheel. However, to make Twitter really work for you, keep a couple of things in mind. If you respond to and retweet the tweets that you find valuable, the originator will be more likely to start a dialog with you. Just lurking (reading only with no actual tweeting) will get you some good information, but getting answers from your posted question benefits from having people who recognize your Twitter name.

Also keep in mind that the many mobile Twitter apps out there are great for keeping your finger on the pulse of your feed and often aid in Twitterburn, that reaction to over-usage that Alka Seltzer can't fix.   My Alka Seltzer for Twitterburn is a free iPad app called Flipboard. It puts your Twitter stream all together in a visually pleasing and easy to browse view. It's worth ten times what I paid for it. ;)

Happy Tweeting! Feel free to share your Twitter resources below! Maybe we'll bump into each other out there. @mrmartinsclass .

Other Resources:  50 Ideas, Twitter in Ed slideshare, Educator's Guide Livebinder,