"Tweet at me!"

While reading up on the idea of using microblogging as an educational tool, I was struck by the simplicity of the following statement made by David Parry regarding how learning has changed: “The citizens of the future are going to have to learn how to participate in these writing mechanisms... Learning used to center around memorizing facts but now it’s a matter of learning how to navigate information”. In the article titled Educators Test the Limits of Twitter Microblogging Tool by Kate Ash, there are many examples of how educators have used microblogging, Twitter in particular, to foster a classroom community and make learning motivational and interesting.  One middle school English teacher, George Mayo, created an account titled "Many Voices" with which students from his classes and students from around the world were able to collaboratively write a fiction story by tweeting one line of the story at a time.  The teacher even got as far as publishing the story! “It was incredibly simple and really amazing,” says Mayo. “My students and I would come in, and suddenly kids in China had written a chapter for the book.”  I think this would be a really fun activity to do with a class or even a whole grade or school.

 In terms of professional development, I think microblogging can be very beneficial for educators looking for ideas or thoughts on classroom situations or issues with students.  Building a network of professionals whose "insights you value", according to the article 9 Reasons to Twitter in Schools by Laura Walker, helps to sift through the masses of accounts and find higher-quality information and resources than Google would offer.  I definitely plan to keep this in mind as I search for people to follow on my professional Twitter account.