#Overwhelmed.

OMG Twitter O.M.G. Let me start with what I love:

     The amount of information, quality articles and essays that you can delve into is insane.  When I start reading one article I quickly find a second or third article tweeted underneath calling out to me.  I find myself rushing through what I am reading so I can start reading something else that looks just as interesting.  Then I suddenly have the need to share this interesting piece of information so the retweeting begins! You can follow me @312Giuliana. I also found the web site paper.li which puts articles and links from Twitter in a newspaper format, I find this so much easier to follow!   This was reweeted by Don Doehla ‏@dr_dmd.  Two great resources on the  paper.li site are edutopia.org and morganmfl.weebly.com 

     My other favorite education feeds so far are @npr_ed , ‏@lingholic.  I also enjoy looking at the more lighted hearted feeds such as @calabriaonline, the content on this particular feed brings up great memories of living in Calabria.  I love that the daily activities which are so particular to this region are being documented with pictures and shared for all to see.  

Traditional Calabrese fig sweets. Photo credit

Olives ready to be harvested.  Photo credit

I also love the collaborative and networking aspect of Twitter, it is wonderful to see so many educators wanting to share their knowledge with the world. 

Now for the parts that are making my head spin:

     The amount of TIME Twitter is taking away from my other responsibilities.  I understand that this may be because I am new to Twitter so I may be over indulging, I feel that when I open my feed, 30/40 minutes just fly by.  I hope to get to the point where I can check Twitter for a few minutes a day and move on with life.  I am also surprised when I see people follow me.   I now feel a bit of pressure to post. 

     I am also having issues participating in a Twitter chat, I am not sure if I get on at the wrong time or I am simply not finding interesting ones where I feel I can contribute something worthwhile to the discussion.  So far the only chat I have found is #langchat and most of that content is specifically Spanish or French. I feel odd just jumping in with an Italian tweet, I do not feel comfortable adding my commentary if I don't think what I am saying is authentic.  I hope to have time to discuss live chats with my department members and see if they have found other chats to participate in.  I ideally I would love to find an Italian teacher chat. 

Technical issues:

Where are my re tweets going?

     One last thing that is driving me insane is not being able to find my retweets I hash-tagged to #edu776nz.  Even the tech person I spoke with couldn’t tell me why my retweets were not showing up on #edu776nz feed, out of a dozen retweets I have posted only 2 have shown up on the feed.  

As I settle in to Twitter I see myself using it to keep up with education articles, authentic resources from Italy and perhaps connecting with other language teachers to share resources.  




Update: I'll be participating in #langchat Thursday! See below.

 One step closer to an Ed chat!