Let’s Travel with
Twitter! By Tammy Maginity
Imagine the surprise on my friend’s face when I told her that I had gone to conferences in San Diego, Ireland, California and Australia…
“I thought schools didn’t have money for trips like that,” she said.
“You can go to any conference you want as long as you don’t leave home,” I replied.
She looked puzzled so I added, “I didn’t actually travel to those places, but I sure learned a lot!”
So what’s the secret? I used Twitter and stayed in the comfort of my own home.
Twitter is a social media tool that allows you to send or “tweet” brief text messages of 140 characters or less to other people who are interested in that information. You can do this through followers or hashtags. If a person “follows” another person on Twitter, they automatically get any tweets in their live feed and can read the information. Hashtags allow a user to tell anyone (followers or not) that the tweet is about a certain topic. When
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people search for that topic, they see the tweet. All hashtags start with a # and then a word or term associated with the topic.
My first conference was the 2012 ISTE National Conference which took place from June 24-26 in San Diego, CA. First, I needed to find the ISTE conference site and read through the materials so that I could find the hashtag they would be using in Twitter. Finding the hashtag would allow me to follow the conversations and find resources being shared by people attending the conference. A quick Google search led me to the conference site at
www.isteconference.org, and I was off and running. Scanning through the headings, I saw that I could look at the conference program as well as download the mobile app for my phone or tablet. These items would come in handy later, but for now I was in search of the hashtag. I noticed that one of the sections in the navigation bar was for ISTE communities. Bingo! It took me to
www.isteconference. org/2012/communities/ which had a list of all the social tools ISTE would be using during the conference. The hashtag for the conference was #iste12. This bit of information would be the key to a lot of learning.
Winter 2013 | MACULJOURNAL
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