Being a Connected Educator: Twitter & Beyond

Our Twitter Chat:

This semester my peers and I were tasked with creating a Twitter Chat to engage teachers, pre-service teachers, industry professionals and supporters of agricultural education.  Twitter chats are fast, informative and spark new ideas and if you scroll through your Twitter feed, chances are there is at least one you can find daily.  Our group chose to do our chat on Supervised Agricultural  Experiences or SAEs.  We chose it because we have a vested interested in it.  Our students will have SAEs and we wanted to hear from the experts about "SAE: Thinking Inside and Outside the Box."  The ideas and resources flowed in.   The chat brought many answers, and even more questions (which as a developing educator, I appreciate)! 

SAE Chat Highlights:

- Resources from current teachers in the field

- New thoughts and ideas of how to evaluate and take time for SAE

- Cool Success Stories from Ag Teachers

Being a Connected Educator: 

As I said Twitter chats are fast, and not always easy to catch up with, but they provide a unique opportunity to engage with agricultural educators from across the country.  As a pre-service teacher I value the contacts, ideas and questions that other educators provide, especially ones with more experience than I have.  Wherever I choose to teach, I know that I can still connect with these teachers- and if I am lucky run into them at National Convention!

Twitter and the Teach Ag Chat are important ways to be connected especially in our field, but they are only two ways.  I think blogging, other social media outlets and even community outlets show us how to be a connected educators as well.  Recently for class we read an article from Time Magazine, titled, Teen Depression and Anxiety: Why the Kids Are Not Alright.  The article dove into challenging topics of  overconsumption of social media, anxiety and even self harm- pressures on students that are sometimes created by social media.  Social media is an area of my job, life, and students life that I will NOT ignore, and I will CHOOSE to use in and outside of class, I have to relate to students where they are at.   So yes, I will continue to engage on social media, but I will also encourage students to use it wisely and be aware of the joys and challenges in can bring.  Being a connected educator is being that 'check up' and connected to what students might see, face or experience, but it is also connecting with the professionals in my career and networking to bring new ideas to students!