Twitter Meme

Franki (A Year of Reading) has done so much thinking and learning about 21st century literacy in the past year since the NCTE convention. That really seemed to be a turning point in her learning and her quest for knowledge. Franki, Mary Lee (A Year of Reading), and Katie (Creative Literacy) came back from the convention and started twittering because they had heard so much about Twitter from people at the convention. In the beginning, it was an opportunity to try out a new technology and see if it had purpose and meaning for them. Now, 8 months later, Twitter has become a way of further investigating ways to weave 21st century literacy into their students' lives.

These three ladies convinced me to try Twitter. At first, it was mostly a social thing for me; an opportunity to check in on people's lives in 140 characters or less. Was it necessary? I'm not sure about that, but I did enjoy the quick check-ins.

As time went on, I started to add more meaning to Twitter. Many blog friends became members, and using a site called tiny.url, we could convert our blogs to fit the character limit, and start to share out blogs that were meaningful to us. Now I was able to talk about literacy using Twitter.

But, this summer, I made an even bigger leap. I started to pay attention to my Twitter friends who would "retweet" (RT) a great tweet that they had read. And, as it turns out, these retweets that I'm following all deal with 21st century literacy in the classroom. It has been an amazing journey of learning and one I've just begun.

So today, when Franki asked me to be part of her Twitter meme that shows a mosaic of people who are my Twitter friends that I learn with and from each and every day, I was delighted to do it. So, with no further ado, here are the people who are helping my learning grow. It seems only fitting that since they are the ones that introduced me to Twitter that Katie, Mary Lee, and Franki are the first three Twitter friends in my mosaic.

Get your twitter mosaic here.

It would be interesting to see how this list changes throughout the next year. I imagine that there are several people who I will want to add to this list as I get more comfortable with Twitter.