For this assignment, I was required to blog about an educator I decided to follow on Twitter. While to some this may seem easy, I found myself very overwhelmed by the entire process. The mass amount of people on Twitter led to massive amount of people who called themselves educators. Weeding out the good profiles form the bad profiles took a while, but ultimately I found some very inspiring and interesting educators to follow on Twitter.
The one educator I have chosen to discuss is Joan Young and her twitter name is @flourishingkids and quite honestly you should really consider following her. What I learned from Joan Young’s Twitter page is that she is an elementary teacher and an academic coach. I found this very interesting because I am not even sure what an academic coach is. Immediately I was interested so I decided to dig further, and I was very pleased with everything I read. Joan Young describes herself as “having a passion for building efficacy in kids.” She is also the author of “25 Super Sight Word Songs & Mini-Books” which was published by Scholastic. She also has a blog, http://www.allkidscanflourish.blogspot.com , which she runs daily along with keeping up with her Twitter account. Joan Young has 8,451 followers but in the past few days I have been following her that number grows quickly.
What I found most inspiring about her was her dedication to all different fields in Education. Along with all of the above mentioned accomplishments, she is well versed in using technology to benefit her classroom and students. All of these aspects make her a great educational role model and a great resource to follow on Twitter. Twitter provides the easy access to her interests, ideas, views, and blog. Most of her followers consist of other educators, administrators, people in the educational technology field, and there appeared to be some aspiring students like myself! She tweets about different types of technology she used or liked, educational issues, or just about her personal experience in the classroom which leads to many discussions from other educators and professionals in the field from all over the country ( and sometimes even the world!) Many of the people Joan Young follows are also credible resources for educational topics and when I started to skim through them I found many more people who I would like to follow because of how inspiring they are!
There are a few main reasons why I found Joan Young so inspiring. First, she teaches the age group I would like to and provides clear examples of how she uses technology every day in her classroom. I hope to one day be able to do this as well as many of the people I have now followed on Twitter, so what better way to learn than from a source who is clearly successful! Second, I admire how she has branched off into all different fields of educations, from writing blogs to writing published books! This is also something I aspire to do, so I feel like she would be a good person to talk to about these ideas and dreams of mine. Finally, she just seems very cool, personable, and down to earth.
Overall, I really enjoyed the experience of going and finding educators on Twitter. This had made me realize what a good information, networking, and advertising tool Twitter can be. I look forward to being able to participate in the education twitter dsicussion/debates once I have a classroom of my own!
Inconsiderately Polite 