Library Media Tech Talk

I love attending conferences and professional development during the summer months since they really get me thinking about the upcoming school year. My wife Cindy and I just attended the Arkansas Association of School Librarians (ArASL) conference in Little Rock, Arkansas. It's also great to see librarian friends from around the state at these events. Reconnecting with old friends and making new friends are key at every conference. I have noticed that there always seem to be a few big takeaways from all conference sessions. I want to share a few of these points with you because they are important. First, I was thrilled to meet our keynote speaker, Nikki D. Robertson, at this conference. I've been following Nikki for quite a while on social media. As I recall, I first connected with her during a #TLChat session on Twitter months ago. I have enjoyed learning from Nikki through her blog , #TLChat, TL News Night, and TL Virtual Cafe .  Kaitlyn Price (my new partner LHS lib...

Six Ways To Build Your PLN Using Twitter Since becoming active on Twitter over the past year and a half, I have noticed some best practices that users with a large following seem to have in common. There are many benefits to having a larger professional personal learning network (PLN). More connections equals more information coming across your Twitter feed. One of the most life changing benefits is that if you follow inspiring and innovative educators, many of them will follow you back. This always leads to powerful idea sharing and sometimes even collaboration! Using Twitter in this way will also allow you to build an audience for your library program (or classroom, niche, etc). This is an asset to your organization, especially if you are sharing your best practices. Before you can attract followers in your profession, be sure to have a photo of yourself on your Twitter account. In addition, complete your biographical information. It has also been recommended to me (by one of my ...

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 Twee...

Still puzzled by Twitter? I know I'm still learning about this great social media tool too! If you didn't catch the first part of this post, go here . I'll cover what I've learned about Hashtags and Twitter chats in this post. What is a Hashtag anyway ? When I first started using Twitter, I couldn't figure out how to find people to follow. I didn't know how to find Tweets about the topics that interested me. Hashtags helped me find these items! A Hashtag  is a keyword or phrase (no spaces) with a "#" at the beginning. The keyword or phrase helps categorize the Tweet. These words can be anything from #edchat (a popular education hashtag) to #bestmemoriesof2014 (a popular hashtag at the end of 2014).  You can search a specific hashtag by going to the "search Twitter" tool and typing it in. Twitter will then show you the current Tweets and photos posted to that hashtag. You can get a list of Educational Hashtags here  (thanks ...