Journal 4 (NETS-T V) "Join the Flock” and "Enhance Your Twitter Experience"

Ferguson, H. (2010). Join the flock. Learning and Leading With Technology, 12-14. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-leading/digitaledition/digital-edition-march-april-2013

Miller, S. M. (2010). Enhance your twitter experience . Learning and Leading With Technology, 14-16. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-leading/digitaledition/digital-edition-march-april-2013

                In the article "Join the Flock,” Hadley Ferguson explains the benefits of building a professional learning network, or PLN, through Twitter. She describes how building up your PLN will connect you to other educators around the globe and help you with your life-long learning goals. She posits a few easy steps to getting your PLN started. The first is fairly obvious, to set up an account. Second is to learn how to follow people with similar interests as you. Third is to get familiar with lists and how they help you find great people to follow. The forth tip she provides is to simply watch the twitter feeds and listen to what those you are following have to say. The last tip is to participate in Twitter and post information or opinions that others might find interesting.

Does this article succeed in persuading you to start a twitter account and begin creating a PLN?

               -Yes, the article breaks the process down into very simple easy steps to follow and it describes a very interesting learning community online. I am defiantly interested in building up my own PLN and connecting to other educators like me.

                In the article "Enhance Your Twitter Experience," Shannon McClintock Miller discusses the convenience of certain tools associated with twitter that can make creating and working inside your PLN much easier. The main resource she talks about is Tweetdeck, an online Twitter feed organizer. Hootsuite is another such organizer resource she mentions. Both programs organize the tweets in your twitter account. In Tweetdeck she explains how you can organize your tweets into columns. The columns can be All Friends, Mentions, Direct Messages, or you can create special columns to organize particular lists or hash tag searches. Another resource she mentions is a Bookmarklet which sounds like it works very similar to Diigolets where they bookmark a site and enable you to share that bookmark with online communities.

Do you think Tweetdeck is a useful online tool?

                -Yes, I think Tweetdeck is an extremely useful online tool. Twitter confuses me and I have a hard time keeping up with all the different feeds and groups I’m interested in. Tweetdeck makes it easier to organize and access tweets. Even with Tweetdeck it still feels a bit overwhelming at times but it defiantly helps.