Teachin' and Tweetin' and Whatnot...

Twitter can be a very polarizing subject these days, for every example of how it is bringing people together and forming global connections there are opposite examples of harassment or hate speech also being spread over the platform.  As someone who has been using twitter for over seven years now I've seen both sides of this argument many times, and I think what it boils down to, is that twitter is what you make of it for yourself.
Like I said I have been using twitter for a long time but it has been more to share thoughts or jokes with my friends and not necessarily for me "productive" purposes.  It was interesting to both look through the Twitterchat and read these articles about twitter to see on other side of it after all this time and to see how it can be used to help in my teaching. 

The first article I found entitled The Teacher's Guide to Twitter is a fantastic source of both guidance and information four educators getting started on twitter, plus  also had this great guide to education hashtags on Twitter. An other article I found from the National  Education Association, was called Can Tweeting Help Your Teaching?  While the first article was more of a guide this one was interesting because it offered some real life examples of how were using twitter in their teaching.  Both of these articles offered a lot of good information but the one thing I took away from them was the idea of being able to stay connected with other teachers.  Currently, I teach about 30 hours a week online from home, this gives me great flexibility with my schedule that in person classes wouldn't be able to give me.  However, the main drawback is that I have little to no connection with other teachers in my same position.  That is why I really liked what these articles had to say about staying connected, they showed me that it's a great way to talk to and share ideas waive other teachers on a regular basis and that is something that I'm not afforded the opportunity to do in my current position.  I am looking forward to doing this in the future and I hope that it will add a lot to what I can offer my students.
Like I said at the beginning there are definitely some drawbacks to twitter and I might be hesitant to let students use it unless they were very highly supervised but it is definitely a tool that can be used and as teachers we have to be willing to use any tool that is offered to us.

Connectivism and the Modern Student

            

  The modern student is very much like the modern bank customer. If we look at knowledge as currency like George Siemens does in his article, Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age we can think of learners as bank customers who are able to withdraw knowledge from computers and networks all over the world in the same way that people who need money can withdraw it from any ATM in the world.  The same can be said for the way customers put money into a bank, as Siemens says, "Personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into organizations and institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to individual." In the same way that knowledge is fed into a network, people put money into a bank, and that money goes on to be dispersed among all of the customers but can also be retrieved when the original depositor needs it. 

What’s important about this analogy is that it changes how we look at education, where students are no longer just expected to just take in knowledge. As Siemens also says in the video, The Conflict of Learning Theories with Human Nature, "As human beings we desire to externalize what's in our head." I think this is an important idea to take away from Connectivism, that we must let students put their knowledge back into the network and make sure that we are not only dishing out knowledge, but we give students the tools to find knowledge for themselves and express their interpretations of that knowledge.