Journal 4: Article - 1 Join the Flock. Article 2 - Enhance Your Twitter Experience

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

Miller, S. (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/issues/Join_the_Flock.aspx


The article titled "Join the Flock!" by Hadley Ferguson basically goes over the reasons why teachers would benefit form creating a Twitter account. After creating a Twitter account, an educator should begin to follow others whom have similar interests and provide topics on education. This allows the teacher to become part of a Personal Learning Network (PLN). Once in a PLN such as an educationally oriented Twitter account, the teacher will have quick and easy access to up to date and relevant information on education


The article titled "Enhance your Twitter Experience" by Shannon McClintock Miller goes over how to make the Twitter PLN a better educational tool by actively participating on twitter. This involves following people that post information relevant to the teacher as well as the user posting tweets using hashtags to provide relevant information to other educators following or searching those hashtags. The article also goes over tools for Twitter such as the organizer called, TweetDeck which can be used to organize information streams into columns.

Question 1: Why is being part of a PLN using Twitter beneficial to an educator?


Answer 1: Being part of a Twitter PLN allows an educator quick and easy access to relevant material provided by other members of a PLN. For example, if a teacher's curriculum involved teaching about history, then he or she can join a PLN and gain access to information that other history teachers find interesting or useful.

Question 2: How does active participation in a PLN using Twitter allow teachers to gain and distribute information about a topic they are interested?


Answer 2: By using hashtags (#) teachers can follow tweets by other people that post information relevant to a certain hashtag. The teacher as an active member of the Twitter PLN they are involved in can also post a tweet using a hashtag to distribute any other participants in the PLN that also use that hashtag. For example, if a teacher posts a tweet using the #history hashtag then other members following that hashtag as part of the PLN will be able to see that information.