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Tech Task #8

Twitter - an app full of possibilities. Twitter overall for me has been a weird experience I would say. I first created an account when I was around grade 10 and was a very active user. I loved it for memes mostly and it was also a form of social media that was separate from my mom and other parents. That on its own was very appealing. Facebook was too censored for my likings at the time and Instagram or Snapchat was not very popular yet. In the years since I first joined, I sort of fell off of the Twitter wagon. I only would check it occasionally in desperate times of boredom. When I found out that a Twitter account was suggested for this class I dusted off the old account and got it ready to roll. It was very entertaining to go back and look through what I had thought to be quality tweets back in 2013. In retrospect, I should have just created a whole new account but it sure was a fun-filled afternoon deleting the cringy tweets on my account. 

I know that social media is growing in the education world but my mind had never thought of using Twitter. It is a fantastic platform for teachers to use because so many other educators are using it as well. It is great that teachers can use Twitter to bounce ideas off of each other and discuss the ins and outs of the education world. I was able to follow many of my classmates who I will graduate alongside and be able to keep in touch as we all go in our separate directions. That is one of the best features of social media, as we all move on in our lives we can still support one another if we continue our Twitter use. I hope to continue using my Twitter account and maybe use it in the classroom as well. 

In our Internet for Educators class, we had presenter, Tyler Letkeman, who mentioned many ways he used technology and tech resources in the classroom. He mentioned how he uses social media as a vessel for student writing assignments and his example was Instagram. My mind went to Twitter and how it would be a fantastic way to encourage writing in the classroom. It could be a fun assignment for students to create tweets around a certain topic. Much more exciting than putting pen to paper. I used a Twitter template to complete one of my assignments just this term and think it turned out pretty good. Check it out: Twitter Assignment Example 

Twitter can also be used as a way of teaching students about fake news or digital citizenship. There are so many accounts out there that would be great examples of this. Demonstrating that not everything you see on social media is true. Twitter can be a great platform for education if used correctly. 

I hope to continue exploring the possibilities of Twitter in an educational setting and am glad that this class gave me the opportunity to re-open and re-discover the app. Below I have attached some of the newly discovered twitter pages that I have enjoyed following for educational purposes. 

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