Although I've had Twitter for over 3 years, I've used it only a couple of times. A friend set it up for me back in undergrad because she is a Twitter addict and I guess she was hoping I would become one too...To her dismay it didn't happen since my last login and my only tweet was from March 03, 2010. All the people I am following were chosen by my friend so please realize my Twitter is in no way an accurate representation of myself. You can access my twitter here.
The educational hashtags that were of most interest to me were... #edreform #achievementgap #strugglingreaders #schoolchoice because they are all hot topics that I am very passionate about. The hashtag search was a little weird to me because I was expecting that I would get results from high profile and famous people, but instead I saw the tweets from a bunch of random people. It took me a minute to realize that results are ordered from newest to oldest.
I don't particularly like twitter which is the reason I have never really used mine. I don't think people should know or would even care to know every little aspect of my life. I can imagine tweeting "hey bout to go eat breakfast" or "going to class" like who cares!? I can only understand having a twitter if you are a celebrity, famous athlete or politician because they are all public figures and the general population is intrigued by their day to day lives. For the normal everyday person though I think its odd to want every aspect of your life to become public and also very dangerous.
There have been cases where people have been stalked and/or killed because the suspect was able to find out where they were, where they were going and what they were doing all from their twitter and/or Facebook. I strongly believe that if you choose to post such information on a social networking site, you should make it private and only viewable to those people you know and trust.
I spent awhile pondering over the potential benefit Twitter could have in my future classroom. At first I thought no way, Twitter is definitely not appropriate for school! However I realized if nothing else Twitter could be a great way for my students to get to know each other and help build a community within my class. At the beginning of a new year oftentimes the children will not know the vast majority of their classmates and I think by having my students set up a Twitter and follow one another they could get an inside look into their classmates lives. I could perhaps assign them to tweet at least once every school day, for the first few weeks as a fun, get to know each other, beginning of the school year activity. I would warn teachers however to make sure the students create a Twitter for only this purpose. And if they already have one to not follow anyone other than the members of my class to avoid the dangers I spoke of earlier.
I agree, Twitter is a very dangerous world. It seems to have so many dangerous situations that you put yourself in to. I know that it can also be a beneficial to have in class, and I didn't even know that educational hashtags existed until this class. I believe it would be a good tool to use for emergency information or ways to inform students of events, but it would have to have a lot of rules of who could and could not follow that page.
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