Twitter for Professional Learning Communities

Twitter is a social media platform that allows users to send out 140 character "tweets," or messages, with text, photos, videos, and links. The 140 character limit requires users to write messages in a creative way that gets to the point and is designed so that a Twitter feed can easily be scanned through. Twitter is not only used for social media; it is a marketing and new s reporting tool as well. Twitter is an amazing source for getting into contact with people, researching topics, or simply looking into a hobby you might be interested in. 

For educators, Twitter offers endless resources such as the ability to connect with other educators, follow educational advancements, or keep track of new education policies. Every day new teachers are putting their thoughts, experiences, and innovative ideas on Twitter for others to learn from. 

For a professional learning community, or PLC, these teachers' voices are a great source to draw guidance from. A lot of educators connect through Twitter and even host web chats open to other teachers so that teachers across the United States, and even the world, can learn and collaborate with one another. Besides web chats, educational professionals often post links to useful information, lesson plans, or other materials that teacher can use. 

Besides following fellow teachers on Twitter, there are many educational companies such as Edutopia or Scholastic that offer great links. There are also people and companies to follow that focus on a specific field such as STEM or ESL. The members of any PLC have the opportunity to follow professionals in their specific field with resources beyond what might be available in a given school district. 

Professional Learning Communities aim to support one another, enhance the learning experience of students, and find solutions to problems that arise. Twitter helps the members of a PLC to connect to one another by helping the members be current with what is going on in the classrooms of the other members between meetings. 

Twitter is also a great way for teachers to keep up with many different subjects and be knowledgeable on a broad range of subjects. Often times, teachers find links and posts on Twitter that they did not know they were looking for, but end up being extremely helpful. 

Twitter can be used to strengthen the PLC in your school or to create a virtual PLC with professionals from all over the world. The best way to use Twitter to develop a useful PLC is to take the time to find and follow other users with similar interests and explore the links that they share. Of course, belonging a useful and collaborative PLC means that each member, including yourself, must participate and contribute. By using your own creativity and sharing what you are doing with your own students, you can help other teachers develop their PLC as well.

I have only recently started to use Twitter, and I have found the best way to start to build a PLC is to find an educator that you have shared interests with, follow him or her, and then check out who else that person follows. You can also look online for lists of great educational resources online to follow. 

Recently I have found all kinds of useful links on my Twitter feed which I plan to put to good use in the future. Edutopia has posted information about how to teach your students to have meaningful conversation and fun winter science experiments. Another account that I follow, Go Overseas, has provided me a ton of information about teaching ESL in the United States and other countries. Through this account, I have found a number of ESL teachers working abroad that offer invaluable information such as tips and tricks for how to move abroad and teach culturally relevant lessons. 

Twitter has allowed me to connect with a number of credible resources and people that I would not have found by just searching the internet. After researching PLC's more, I found that I had practically already created one on Twitter without even knowing it!

References
[Untitled image of Twitter logo]. Retrieved December 9, 2014 from http://www.southernfriedscience.com/?p=12120

[Unittled image of Twitter Infographic]. Retrieved December 9, 2014 http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/educational-hashtags-on-twitter_b30141

Evernote in Education

Evernote is an amazing note-taking and organizational program that makes the possibility of "going paperless" a reality, and it offers so many other benefits for users with any aim in mind, from students and educators to engineers and businessmen. Part of what makes the program so unique and useful is the fact that it can be accessed from anywhere - any computer, cell phone, or tablet. All that is needed to access the saved information is a log-in email address and password. This free digital notebook allows users to organize unlimited notebooks with unlimited notes inside including webpages, photos, videos, audio files, documents, pdf's, text notes, and more. Evernote is very useful for people in different fields because of its versatility and the fact that people have discovered ways to cater the features of Evernote to the demands of their own jobs.

Practically every job requires some form of collaboration, and Evernote takes that into consideration. Evernote allows users to share notebooks with others, even if they are not Evernote users, so that what the user has created and compiled can be accessed by others. This is a great tool for educators because it allows them to share lesson plans and other documents with other teachers, substitutes, students, and parents. When sharing a note, Evernote generates a URL that links to an html text page where the information can be viewed. The free version of Evernote allows you to share the notes with others, but the premium version is necessary for others to edit the notes.

Evernote also takes into consideration the fact that its users will likely need to organize and reorganize their notes. While researching Evernote I discovered that it is possible to merge multiple notes together into one note, delete multiple notes at the same time, and move notes to other notebooks. To do any of these things, simply hold down the ctrl key on the keyboard and click on the notes that you want to merge, delete, or move. This is especially useful for teachers who want to reorganize or combine lesson plans and de-clutter the rest of their notes.

Another great organization feature that Evernote offers is to create links between notes. You can access any note's "note link" by right-clicking on the note and selecting "copy note link." This will put the link to that particular not on your computer's clipboard. Then, simply paste the note link, which will appear with the name of the note, into another note. You will then have a link from the note where you have pasted the link to the note that you copied the link from, and all that you need to do is click on the name of the note to immediately open it. This is very useful if you have information that you want to remain in separate notes, but you want to be able to access them together quickly because the link will keep the note from getting lost in notebooks. Another great way to use this link feature is to create one note that is the table of contents for the notebook. You can title it "Table of Contents" and keep it at the top of your notebook. Within the note, you can include links to the other notes along with summaries of what they are if need be. This way, you don't have to scroll through all of your notes, and they are listed clearly with a link right in front of you. This could be a great tool for a teacher looking through saved articles, assignments, or lessons. For even easier access, also try storing notebooks in the "shortcuts" tab.

In using Evernote over the past few months, I've found many useful features; Evernote allows its users to save web clippings directly from internet pages, make checklists, tag notes, record audio, and set reminders on notes. These are all fairly basic features, but useful none the less. I think that tagging notes could be particularly useful in organizing notes and resources. As a teacher, I believe that tagging could be used to tag every note having to do with each student with that student's name. Then, when you are looking for information on a certain student, all you need to do is type in the student's name, and every note with that tag will appear. Also, tagging could be a great way to keep track of lesson materials based on subject matter. If everything having to do with a specific topic is tagged with that topic, then it is easy to find every resource on that topic.

Another simple feature that I think is particularly useful for a teacher is the ability to record audio. Teachers could easily use this tool to record students while doing a reading record and checking for student's fluency and miscues. It would also be something great to have saved for parent-teacher conferences if necessary.

One thing that I really like about the Evernote web clipper is that it allows you to clip the entire web page or just take a screen shot, and you can do quite a bit of editing to both. The web clipper allows you to add stickers, change the shape and border of the image, add text, highlight, and write with a marker.  

Evernote also generates an email for every user, and when anything is sent to that email address, it automatically becomes a note. This eliminates the hassle of copying and pasting every email that you need into Evernote and worrying about downloading attachments and re-uploading them to Evernote. When a teacher gets an email about a student and needs to keep the email for reference, he or she can simply forward the email to the Evernote email address, add the tag name of the student, and be finished.

Evernote is a continuously developing program that has branched out quite a bit since its beginning. Now Evernote has a very large number of associated apps for smartphones and tablets such as Skitch and Penultimate which make the experience of using Evernote even better and offer more options and resources for users. When I was researching Evernote, I came across quite a few blogposts and instructional webpages on Evernote that were published a year or two ago, and the program has completely changed for the better. These people were already singing the praises of Evernote, but if the features of the current program were compared to the features of the program two years ago, they would hardly resemble each other. Evernote is consistently developing and changing to improve the possibilities and user satisfaction. There are already a number of ways that Evernote can be used in the classroom, but I would bet that in the near future, Evernote will be an invaluable tool in the classroom for any teacher. 

References
[Untitled image of Evernote features]. Retrieved October 28, 2014 from http://rns0819c56a2lq76d4620mbbv0.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/evernoteapp.png

[Untitled infographic of Evernote organization]. Retrieved October 28, 2014 from http://missspinkontech.global2.vic.edu.au/files/2013/08/Evernote-Organisation-for-Teachers-1-1gp32fn.jpeg

[Unittled image of Evernote web clipping]. Retrieved October 28, 2014 from http://mnli12.wikispaces.com/file/view/hero_webclipper.png/353683370/hero_webclipper.png