From the desk of Mr. Walters

Back on October 17 of 2011, I posted a bit of a guide for my tweeps and colleagues on building your PLN. In that guide, I shared Jeff Dunn's post from earlier in the month, The A-Z Dictionary of Educational Twitter Hashtags , that shared some general points about hash tags that I've applied myself and shared with most of my friends and colleagues over the years. Some of that information is no longer true. Mainly, I want to look at this quote from Dunn's post: The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keyword or topic in a Tweet. Any Twitter user can categorize or follow topics with hashtags.Those hashtags (usually) mean something and are a great way to get a tweet to appear in search results or discussion monitoring . ( Dunn 2011 , emphasis mine)   Hashtags & Top Tweets In order to follow a hashtag, users must complete a search, then save it (typically using a thrird party app, like Hootsuite). This used to provide users with a running timeline of every...

Yeah, there are a hundred or so PLN posts out there. Here's another one. Why? I'm presenting this stuff at an in-service, and I couldn't find all of this stuff in one place. I decided to compile it all on our district web page. Here are the fruits of my labor. My slide deck for the presentation... What is a PLN? Personal Learning Networks, or PLNs, are the collegial relationships you have with peers. Originally, they were your family and friends, maybe other educators you worked with, but thanks to the internet and web 2.0 tools have become much much larger. PLNs can now include myriad communities, including but not limited to social networking sites like Facebook, blogs, Twitter, wikis, social bookmarking tools, LinkedIn, Goodreads, and Ning. n. – the entire collection of people with whom you engage and exchange information, usually online. ( http://bit.ly/Klingensmith )  How to build it Twitter (not just for breakfast anymore) Okay, so maybe...

Okay, so I've had a lot of folks that are new to Twitter ask me this week about the folks I follow. It got me thinking. Follow Friday's, or "#ff" have become a Twitter standard practice. Since we're all psyched about Will Richardson's suggestions of building our own networks yesterday, I thought we should do a Tech.it.u PLN Follow Friday . For the good of the cause, choose one or two of your Tweeps, whom you consider to share very relevant, challenging, or useful information on a regular basis. Compose a quick tweet on Friday (that's tomorrow already) like this: #techitu #ff @jgates513 @willrich45 Great consistent tweets on #edtech Let us know briefly why you follow them. Do they post on your subject? Do they share great Edtech resources? Do they challenge you and sharpen your practice? Those of us trying to build our own PLN via Twitter can watch these #ff posts and choose, hopefully, to follow those who are most relevant to us. Good luck and gre...