PrAACtical Connections with Twitter

Hope you are having a great Better Hearing and Speech Month! Our May Strategy of the Month continues to focus on building our Professional Learning and Resource Network in prAACtical ways. This week we’ll be posting about Twitter.
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While some of you may have been early adopters of the microblogging trend, I just didn’t see the value of Twitter until the past year. As one who doesn’t much care what Paris Hilton had for breakfast or who sat next to whom at the Heat game, it just didn’t interest me. Robin, on the other hand, was tweeting away and kept telling me about wonderful connections she’d made that way. “I’ll get around to it one of these days,” I thought but  kept putting it off until I was out of excuses. Once I was involved, it only took a week or so before I was hooked on the vast array of experience and resources that are shared in that venue. I’m still learning and definitely consider myself a Twitter newbie, but it has been quite a ride.
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I’ll leave it to the experts to talk about how to get started with Twitter, including the folks at Edutopia who wrote this short how-to on Expanding your PLN with Twitter.
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The quickest way to find people and organizations to connect with, in this newbie’s experience, is to follow groups with the same interest and see who tweets things that are in your content area. Then you can connect with (follow) them and engage in the conversation.
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Here are some wonderful sources of hash tag collections that SLPs interested in AAC may want to explore.
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1. SLTags: Speech & Language Twitter #Hashtags Dictionary by Liz Panton (@sltags) of SaLTMine–
2. Teaching All: Blogger Patrick Black has a wealth of information on his sites, including this list of Special Education, AT, AAC, and related hashtags.

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Throughout the week, we’ll be posting more of our favorite tips, people, organizations, and sites to make Twitter part of your prAACtical learning network. In the meantime, let’s connect on Twitter by following one another. You can follow us at @CommGreenhouse (Carole) and @Communica8GH (Robin). Let us know how to find you so we can learn and share together.

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