It all started with retired high school English teacher Tom Whitby who became an adjunct education professor at St. Joseph's College in Brooklyn, NY and began tweeting to exchange best practices, ideas and resources, with other tweeting educators. With two other colleagues last August, he created the hash tag #edchat for educators to attach to their tweets. Then he came up with the idea of conducting weekly, hour-long discussion which would take place every Tuesday (one at 12 noon for European users and one at 7 pm EST for those in North America and Australia. I usually don't follow the chat in real time but I do search for #edchat on Twitter to follow the most recent stream of tweets. In December, 2009 Whitby, Shelly Terrell and Steve Anderson won a prestigious EDUBLOG Award for the most influential Educational Twitter series.
Meanwhile, Whitby created The Educator's PLN(edupln.ning.com), a ning network, and tirelessly promoted it through Twitter. He finally nagged enough so that I jumped on and joined to see what the buzz was all about. Many educators agree that they learn more on Twitter than from any other type of workshop or seminar. I highly encourage you to visit the ning and find many helpful forums, discussions, videos, and other educational sites and nings which are linked. Thank you Tom for creating the ning and for tirelessly promoting it.
Profile Information for Tom Whitby
Twitter ID http://www.Twitter.com/@tomwhitby
Linkedin Profile http://www.linkedin.com/in/thomaswhitby
Delicious name http://www.delicious.com/tomwhitby
Skype Account Name thomas_whitby
Blog http://tomwhitby.wordpress.com/
If you haven't developed a PLN, start here; start now.
No comments:
Post a Comment