Initial Reactions to EDTECH 543

I’ve been asked to record my initial reactions to the social networks for the course as well as my experiences with social media for professional development, and for instruction. Finally, I’ll share my expectations for the course.

The social networks we’ve been asked to join for use in the course are Twitter and Diigo, so far. It wasn’t clear whether we should create new accounts or not, so I chose to not. I’ve had my personal account on Twitter since 2008 (https://twitter.com/thatedeguy) and already have some professional and personal network set up on that account. I don’t recall ever having used Diigo, but I did have a pre-existing account (with 1 bookmark) that I evidently had created back in 2011 (https://www.diigo.com/user/thatedeguy). Any reaction to either site’s usage is rather minimal at this point, as I already had accounts to both. It will be interesting to see the usage of Diigo as I obviously created the account but never really used it much.

My own experience with social media is fairly long. I started and ran several blogs beginning around 2006, and so have developed social media accounts for those as well as used social media as a way to find and develop professional growth opportunities. While each particular occupation likely uses social media slightly different for PD, I think there will be an abundance of similarities. That may end my experience of usage of social media as it pertains to teaching however, as I have never used any social media as a method of instruction or a part of any instructional strategy.

As far as expectations for the course, I hope to learn some of those instructional strategies for using social media responsibly in class as well as find some nuggets of usage for social media as far as professional development goes.