Failure to Tweet

How I tried to use Twitter as a professional learning network, and

disliked every moment of it.

Twitter is a much beloved resource, a revolutionary

platform for communication and networking, one of the most popular websites on the internet.

I hate it.

Great Expectations

This guy’s Dad

agrees

When I signed in to Twitter, I looked carefully

to find and to follow people and groups who seemed as though they would share quality information and ideas.

Anyway.

I diligently compile everything Mignon

Fogerty, a.k.a Grammar Girl, writes/blogs/podcasts. Grammar Girl is a grammar expert who has a knack for explaining grammatical rules and conventions. I adore her work and subscribe to everything that she does.

But, on Twitter…most of what is offered is self-promotional or personal.

Grammar Girl

@grammargirl

Based on these sorts of descriptions…

I was interested to follow like-minded professional teachers; ready to receive their insights, ideas, and advice.

Fellow Teachers…

Instead…

Many professionals use Twitter to have full conversations with other professionals, disregarding the fact that they are publicly posting one side of a conversation for the annoyance of all.

Many, if not most, educational organizations use

Twitter. I signed up to follow Smekens Education, TES English, Edutopia, Discovery Education, and 2learn.ca, as well as others.

I found that these organizations offered up the most substantial tweets, some of which I found very useful.

However, many of these groups tweet hourly during the work week, meaning that they overwhelmed my Twitter feed with links to long articles, blogs, videos and resources.

Organisations

@tes English

My PLN in the end…

pretty pathetic

It didn’t work for me to use Twitter as a tool for

professional growth. I found it to be an annoying time-waster. I found some useful resources digging through the Tweets, but many of them I had seen already on Pinterest or had been sent to me already from another teacher (or pre-service teacher). Even though Twitter won’t be my PLN tool of choice, I’m glad I had the opportunity to try it, if only because…

In sum

Twitter has its uses