Adventure -Twitter Reflection ETEC 527

This week, I am exploring Twitter a little more. I have an older account, but have not used it for a few years. I think the last time I used it was for a book read for Prof. Dev. GT update. I guess the same concept for Blackboard discussion, but for Twitter, I felt there were two many steps to find the current questions we were supposed to answer. Plus, it had limited characters so if my answer was longer, I was out of luck or had to do a reply to finish. Maybe that's why they did it so they wouldn’t have to read long answers lol. The district also likes us to use hashtags and tweet when we have our PD learning at the beginning of the year as well as our convocation. Sometimes they have a contest to the teacher that tweets and hashtags the most during those three days.

I think this could be beneficial for students in high school to possibly use for current event news feeds, communicating with their classmates and teachers, and easy accessibility. Plus, communication between teacher/student responses are posted quickly. I am an Art Teacher at an elementary school so, even though they do have some great art accounts to follow, I do not feel this would be a good platform for elementary students. Other people could get into the account and tweet something that might not be appropriate. I do see in settings that you can block and set up other things to help prevent this, but there are so many different ones. I’m sure I could learn them if I had more time to play around with it.

There are good benefits to Twitter, but I don’t feel it's a friendly user platform for young children. All the different links when trying to read comments and then responding to the correct one. Then the hashtags. This is how it is designed, but I would need something more friendly for my students and myself to use. Maybe, when I have more time to use it and play around with it, I might like it better.

The TweetDeck is pretty cool has everything right there in one place, but I still feel Twitter has too much information and stuff going on. I might be a little ADD and this can be overwhelming to look at for too long. Also looking into topics...there were so many! I like that you can focus on certain subjects/topics. I also saw that you can choose to see less of a topic or company that keeps popping up and I think I saw that you can block them. You can also message people privately. This I did not know. See picture below.

Websites that have a button that allows you to share to Twitter are recipe websites, news websites, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, and I can post my photos onto Twitter from my photo app. I did check out HootSuite and saw that you could link all of your social media to one dashboard. It does cost and the lowest one is 49$ a month which to me seems a little high unless that would be beneficial for your job. Flipboard is a really cool platform to get the news. I actually have this app but haven't used it very much. From sports to food to travel and even videos. Like Twitter, you can choose what you would like to follow. I would recommend it.

W1 Vanity Search - Web 2.0 ETEC 527

My Digital Footprints

My digital presence? Digital footprint? Never really thought of it that way. I began my search using just my married name. Do you know how many Julie Davis’ are out there? In fact, I remember when I had my last child in 1997, there was a Julie Davis who had her baby the previous day. What are the odds? Any who. There were lots of Julie Davis' in many fields of employment, but none of those are me.

It was interesting that one of the searches came up with all the right family members, but I was Julie A Davis IV. I don’t really know where the IV came from, but weird. That was really the only thing I found under search for “Julie Davis” so I used my maiden name along with my married name. Not much came up with that other than my Facebook profile. So I searched just my name with my maiden name only. My dad's obituary came up which brought back sad memories. Also, my Facebook and Ancestry.com.

I went back a couple of days later and did another search. J's Closeout Store popped. This was not there on the previous search. I had forgotten about a store my dad and I owned. Unfortunately, it wasn't open very long. Interesting that it came up on this search and not the last one.