Week 8: Twitter

I feel like I may have needed to be in a more creative frame of mind to get better use out of the keyword search. Using the different "Words" advanced search options, I tried a variety of keywords at first. My attempts included, but were not limited to, education, academic counseling, academic advising, school counseling, Oceanside, and inspiration. I found a few users with this approach, but felt like I was just following people in order to complete the assignment. What I found was that without being profit driven, I was mainly looking for users to borrow ideas from and to retweet. The other criteria were finding organizations that seemed to be on the cutting edge of educational technology, innovation, and practices. After more unsatisfying attempts, I proceeded to look up people, businesses, schools, and organizations specifically by name. Similarly to my Facebook adds, I started with local colleges that our students most often transfer to. I then tried an individual, Sir Ken Robinson, who has done extensive work with creative approaches to teaching and increasing creativity in schools. In many ways I used Twitter more like somebody would use Pinterest. I chose users with the intention to identify, share, and try to implement the ideas that I might come across from those I follow.

Once I began adding more of these users, I was able to more than double who I followed by exploring the suggested users that were coming up. The next part of the assignment came in extremely handy, given my now wide array of users that I was following. I created five lists to help organize the different users that I was following. What was nice about I see the benefit in using these lists, for one I can find users much easier without having to search down the list or through my news feed. I can also see how I would find inspiration from some users posts and having users organized by lists allows a much easier way to search for preferred users.

The Twitter account that I am using for this was created at the end of 2014, however it has been used very sparingly and only for dissemination of information. While this has been extremely useful, I see that this doesn't garner much engagement, and really doesn't make for a very interesting profile. I found some great ideas from exploring other schools posts and I plan to implement them this week. I originally thought to strategize the ones posting the different ideas, in case I wanted to save some if we get a larger following, however there is no sense in saving any aces up my sleeve. This week I will be sending a few tweets with calls to action. With these being students, I feel that the best time to tweet is mid-day to afternoon since students typically sleep in later and are busy with their social lives in the evening. I'm optimistic for responses, but with so few followers I'll be realistic with my expectations.