Tweet Us Some #Inspiration!

This school year, I have become hopelessly addicted to Twitter! As a result of Twitter education chats, I have gained many new connections in the education field. It has changed the way I think about learning and communicating professionally. I am constantly trying to think of new ways to model good social media behavior for our learning community.

Recently, the PARCC test has been a strain on our school in both personnel requirements and technology resources. I have been serving as a test administrator for the past two weeks and have been unable to plan any engaging library programming... until two days ago.

I decided that we should try to Tweet successful people on Twitter for inspiration! I took requests from students, teachers, and administrators after PARCC test sessions. I took these lists home and started Tweeting at night. The lists included actors, singers, authors, athletes, news anchors, and more. I Tweeted around 20 people wondering if I would get a response... The Tweets looked like this:

I tweeted out the above example last night at 7:41 PM. This morning as I was driving to our school campus, my Twitter notification went off. I looked at the phone after I parked, and this Tweet had arrived!

Mr. Johnson had Tweeted a great quote for our students. "Interesting how the harder you work the luckier you get!" I couldn't wait to get inside to share this with teachers and students! The normal drudgery of testing and the last nine weeks of school just got brighter as I shared the wisdom of the great coach! We had used Twitter for something other than selfies or boasting... we had used it for communication outside of our school walls. A communication with a celebrity who shared a very effective sentence with the Lakeside learning community.

A few minutes later, I heard from Arkansas' Today'sTHV (CBS Affiliate) Meteorologist, Tom Brannon.

The day before we heard from these individuals: T.A. Barron (author), Diana Falzone (FOX News, NY), and Jim Lichtenstein (Co-Exec Producer of CBS's The Henry Ford's Innovation Nation with Mo Rocca). Here are their Tweets:

Now that we have several responses, we plan to create a display of each person's bio and their inspirational Tweet! I'll share this soon on a future post. I'm also going to continue Tweeting different celebs over the next several weeks. I'll continue taking requests from students and teachers! I'm hoping all that see these great examples will realize that social media has great potential in education. We now have access to people and companies that were previously unreachable! We have only scratched the surface of possibilities! Go here for part two of this activity and see how we displayed these Tweets!

Click here to see how we used Twitter during an 8th grade research skills lesson.

Go here if you want to know more about Twitter education chats.

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