Journal 4: "Join the Flock" and "Enhance Your Twitter Experience"

Journal #4: “Join the Flock” and “Enhance Your Twitter Experience” (NETS 5)

Join the Flock:
Ferguson, H. (2010). Join the flock. Learning and Leading with Technology, 37(8),12-14, Retrieved from
http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-and-leading/issues/Join_the_Flock.aspx

Summary: This article, written by a middle school history teacher, outlines how to join Twitter and several tips about how to get involved in it. She discusses this as an important aspect to creating a PLN (Personal Learning Network) which can give you a great deal of information if you know how to use it. She then continues to inform the reader about the basics to learning how to access information, including following people, viewing and participating in lists/discussions, and sharing your own knowledge via retweeting posts. Also, she encourages users to post their own tweets and in order to get the information to the largest amount of people, to also include hashtags that you know have a decent following. She is informative and encouraging that this is a useful tool that is easy to master.

Q1: How can I see myself using this information to expand my PLN and actively use Twitter to stay informed?
A1: I need to start with following more people who have similar interests to mine and making sure to retweet posts that I find particularly interesting or doing research of my own to tweet. The author provided some of her favorite people that she follows on Twitter, so if I start to follow some of them, I might find more people that I have similar interests to.

Enhance Your Twitter Experience:
Miller, S. M. (2010). Enhance your twitter experience . Learning and Leading with Technology, 37(8), 14-17. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-and-leading.aspx

Summary: In this article, the author provides ways to manage your Twitter account once you have established the main foundational aspects that were discussed in the “Join the Flock” article. She discusses programs like TweetDeck and HootSuite, which allow you to use all the functions of Twitter, such as replies, retweets, tweets, etc, but also allows you to pay attention to certain streams that particularly interest you. She also outlines the importance of using bookmarking sites to make sure that you can save articles and resources that you find interesting so that you are able to tweet them at a later time.

Q1: How would using a program like TweetDeck or HootSuite help me to expand my PLN?
A1: The main thing that these programs can help me with is managing my different interests that I will explore through Twitter. I can make sure to have a stream for certain hashtags that I would like to be updated on as well as other lists and certain followers. I see myself using this tool to also add some of the other aspects of my PLN in order to have just one place to go for information.