I've been using Twitter for over a month now, and I'm finding it to be an excellent source of information on just about anything! I choose to follow an eclectic mix of fellow bloggers, celebrities, journalists, librarians, educators and organisations. Everyone from Smoochiefrog to Audrey Nay to No Country for Young Women to the United Nations to Mia Freedman. Some tweets entertain me, some allow me to engage in a conversation, and some contain links to information that is relevant to my daily life as a mum, teacher and student of librarianship.
I've also changed the website bookmarking tool that I use; I'm now using delicious rather than the favourites tab on internet explorer. Why? Delicious uses "tags" to organise my bookmarks rather than folders. This allows for overlap; the fact that some websites fit into more than one category. Also, I've discovered packrati.us via Twitter, which automatically bookmarks the links in my tweets for me. There are a number of setting options, and I've chosen to make sure that anything that I retweet gets bookmarked. It's so easy! If a tweet comes through on my timeline with an interesting link, I retweet straight away. Not only am I passing on the link/information to my followers, I'm also automatically bookmarking the link for myself. Super!
The only problem that I'm having is keeping up with the flow of information! So far I'm following 111 tweeps, and I'm very careful about adding more and increasing the amount of information flowing my way! Here is a small selection from the vast amount of wonderful information relating to libraries, teacher librarians, using technology in learning, reading and publishing that I've collected so far. Of course I've found out a lot of other stuff too, but here I'm only including information that is particularly related to reading, learning and teaching.
Twitter4Librarians is a resource page designed to help librarians better use Twitter. I found it via @sandynay, who retweeted it from @infodivabronx.
Education and Second Life is a blog post by Judy at hey jude (@heyjudeonline on Twitter) that includes a video showing how Teen Second Life is being used in the classroom.
MAEVE Magazine is a free online magazine which sets out to provide an alternative to the mainstream women's mags. I found out about it via @JulesyParker who writes for MAEVE and blogs at Beautiful You.
Internet Safety is a blog post by Ruth at skerricks (@ruth_skerricks on Twitter) which discusses how to successfully teach students about internet safety and includes links to other articles and documents.
If you are a teacher or a librarian, or the mother of school age kids, you may find some of the above information interesting or useful. Even if you're not, I hope that this post inspires you to use Twitter to gather information that is meaningful to you.
Happy tweeting!
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