Enjoy Teaching, Enjoy you Twitter

I've never think that Twitter is so organized, when I put the hashtag for great educational microblogging,  I found a lot of educational Twitter. Although I have Chinese Twitter-WeiBo, but it has limited resources for either teaching or learning. Being a member of such a powerful social network citizens, I will pay more attention to exploring the microblogs for my own professional development and for my future teaching.

Since I am planning to teach young kids English when I back to my home country, I've got a large amount of great suggestions in the articleTeachers Guide to the Use of Twitter in the Classroom. The author has provided a lot of interesting ideas that I can used in my future class.

Based on the picture I think I will use Twitter as a tool to connect both my students and their parents with me.  For my students, I will set a tweet about the study or school life everyday as a motivational tool to encourage my students. I may also ask them to write a tweet after every class as a kind of self-reflection. In addition, I can use Twitter to leave instant message for the class. I think Twitter can also used for sharing any useful learning document, video or electronic books with my students. Besides, it's also a good place to leave questions for the students, and others can help the kids solve their problem as soon as possible. Furthermore, I think I will also use this network to connect the kids' parents with me, for example, if we have any program that need help or cooperation of the parents, I will invite them to follow our Twitter, assisting the kid's learning process.

However, as a young teacher, I feel that Twitter might also a efficient tool for my professional development. Since I've have my own Twitter account and I've following many creative educational microblggings, I will keep following them even when I go back to China. These educational microbloggings have extended my learning space; they allowing me to keep paced with the technology development in teaching all the time. Besides  I've read an online article which is named Great Twitter Tools for Your Professional Development, the article posted a list of awesome Twitter tools which can be used for my professional development, for example TwitTV, YouTwit, Tweet Topic Explorer.

Each of the different tools contains information about technology education, I can always find the updated videos or news about teaching and learning. I can also using the Tweet Topic Explorer to find the topics I'm interested in. I feel all of these tools have increased my learning and teaching resources, I will keep working on it. People always say that we can connected with friends we with Twitter, but I think it also enable me to connected to the great technology educators. The information they shared might influence the classroom effect and they may also boost my professional development.