I've been sitting on 70 drafts of tweets for three days, and it's killing me. The plan is to make it one more day, and then I'm gonna blow Twitter up. I get to spend my Tuesday with the teachers of one of my elementary campuses, but this time, it's different. This Tuesday I am charged with the task of convincing teachers to tweet daily.
Teachers need to unite and make all our positives so loud that we drown out the negatives. Having turned to Twitter recently, I am excited that this is going to our latest platform. In addition to #happyclassrooms, our teachers will be using #publicschoolproud and #gentryproud. So, if you have anything to brag on happening in your classrooms or schools, please use the appropriate hashtag so we can document our story.
Speaking of bragging, there are teachers out there doing extraordinary things (and sometimes what seems ordinary to one is extraordinary to another). If I am going to convince teachers to tweet every day, especially ones who are hesitant in doing so, I have to prove them the value of what Twitter can personally do for them. I thought of an idea, talked it through with a colleague, shared it with the principal, and #bragonateacher was born a week ago. No one that I had seen ever tweeted with that hashtag, so I knew that I could track anything that was mentioned with that hashtag. I also knew that I could just Google 100 most popular hashtags, but these teachers would likely have zero connection with these (and may even question what a hashtag is). I reached out to co-workers, friends, and even strangers to brag on a past or present teacher and use the hashtag; I'm incredibly thankful for all who did that. But it still wasn't enough. I needed to make it more memorable - personal. So, a few days ago I hung out in the gym all day and just started asking kids to tell me why their teachers are special. I'm not gonna lie, those kinder babies melted my heart, but my favorites were some of the older kids who you could tell were just dealt a bad hand. They shared that their teachers "treated them like their own sons" and they "are like a mom" to many. I'm so ready to share those #bragonateacher moments. On the backend, I hope teachers will see that Twitter isn't another thing you have to do. I want them to want to do it. I want them to connect with each other in a different way than they do in their PLCs. I want Twitter to become their PLN - personal learning network. Twitter offers a diverse network of fellow educators and resources who are designed to make us better teachers. You could've been a great teacher 10 years ago, but if you've changed nothing, you could be irrelevant. I encourage everyone else to blow Twitter up with relevance.
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