Facebook and Twitter

In this blog post I will be sharing my take on two social media outlets, Facebook and Twitter and how they are used in education.  I am relatively familiar with both social media outlets but not really as a tool for education or education.  I was in meeting this week with library media specialists this week and one of topics discussed was the importance of social media as personal learning community and network.  When I first began using Facebook it was really just to connect with old friends but more and more I have found myself using Facebook to see what other teachers and librarians are doing in their classrooms and libraries. 

So through this assignment I was able to connect with school libraries and explore what is happening in libraries.  From my exploration of libraries on Facebook I found one common theme which was promotion.  They were promoting book contests, fundraisers, school events, club events that happen in the library, and spotlighted books in their libraries.  Some pages had links to articles about reading and books, podcasts, and author pages.  So another topic that was discussed in the meeting I was in this week was for libraries to promote themselves on social media and Facebook seems to be the way to do just that.  An advantage to using Facebook to promote the library is instant documentation for principles and school board members who may be questioning the importance of the library in schools. Another advantage to promoting the library on Facebook is networking.  Librarians connecting with other librarians opens opportunities for sharing and collaboration which is the key to student success.  Some disadvantages to using Facebook could be negative comments and attitudes expressed on the page.  Another disadvantage could be up keep.  If they page is not kept up to date, then it does not serve its purpose which in my opinion is to promote the great things happening in the library.

Twitter was the other social media outlet I explored for this assignment.  I am becoming more familiar with Twitter as I am using it to promote my own classroom happenings. For me Twitter is a personal learning network.  I have connected with people that share my same interests in my classroom and I am learning a great deal about educational technology.  Through my exploration of the educational technology leaders on Twitter I found they tweeted about the latest technology and articles pertaining to educational technology. Exploration also lead me to topics I want to learn more about and wrote down to explore later.  A few of those were The Creativity Project and the See, Think, Wonder routine which I hadn’t heard anything about until my exploration.  In my opinion Twitter helps to connect followers to knowledge they might not otherwise know about. 

Here are a few tweets that caught my interest:

25 awesome apps for teachers, recommended by teachers via the awesome @Edutech20 https://t.co/zbMFTAID7t pic.twitter.com/qn39Y4xzcP

— Gwyneth Jones (@GwynethJones) January 23, 2017

OK, Google's Toontastic 3D for iPad is seriously fun! My (lame) test: https://t.co/0yNEsK3vzI https://t.co/pypqr3owPS

— Kathy Schrock (@kathyschrock) January 14, 2017