Twitter Expert Connect Assignment Reflection

I’m a 9th grader and I’m taking a class called Digital Citizenship. The purpose of Digital Citizenship class is to teach us how to navigate the digital world safely responsibly and ethically. At my school everyone in 9th grade is required to take the Digital Citizenship class. Two months ago in Digital Citizenship class we started a project called the “Twitter Expert Connect Assignment”. For this assignment we had to pick a topic of interest and follow at least 10 people on twitter that have a very good understanding on that topic for example a teacher. But we had to choose people that would be able to reply to us, so we were told not to pick a celebrity for this assignment. We just had to follow  credible people and people that were active on twitter. Next, we had to create a public list for our topic of interest and we had to add our “experts” onto the list. Then, we had to mention them and to tweet them on twitter consistently, so that the experts knew that we were active on twitter and we were not trying to waste their time. All of that was only the first part of the assignment, which was all about us following the experts and trying to get in contact with them. The second part was all about us asking the experts question. This part was harder than the first part. First, we had to make a draft of questions we were going to ask the experts. The question had to be about our topic of interest and the question had to be very direct(not a question that google can easily answer for us) We had to ask all of the 10 experts one question. Secondly, we had to finalize the questions and ask the experts the questions. The questions we were meant to ask, were meant to be sent as a public tweet addressed to the expert and we had to tag then on the tweet, so that they knew it was directed to them. The questions had to be ethical and polite. We had to greet the expert, explain to them why we were tweeting them/tell them about our assignment, and then finally ask them our question. Later after we send the questions we had to wait for the experts to respond and leave a like on their reply and take note on the information they gave us when they respond. That was all we had to do for Part 2. Finally, Part 3 is this reflection, that I’m currently writing.

 

The topic I chose was Physical Education in schools. I chose Physical Education in schools because I believe that teaching P.E is very different from teaching a class like science or any other class because I believe that P.E is a very active class and very competitive and more enjoyable than other classes. I followed 10 P.E teachers that work in the United States because I believe they are experts on my topic.      

 I followed:

Mark Friedrich – @AdventureEdGuyhttps://twitter.com/AdventureEdGuy

John Hall – @jonhallPEhttps://twitter.com/jonhallPE

Nicole Wenthur – @wenthurPEhttps://twitter.com/wenthurPE

Mike Martinez –  @PhysEdFreakhttps://twitter.com/PhysEdFreak

Mark Banasiak – @MoreThanGymhttps://twitter.com/MoreThanGym

Susan Shearer – @ShearersSusanhttps://twitter.com/ShearersSusan

Delke Crouthamel – @delkechttps://twitter.com/delkec

Coach_B – @coach_britton1  – https://twitter.com/coach_britton1  

Jason Leach – @jkleach01https://twitter.com/jkleach01

Lisa Cutting – @lisajean9 –  https://twitter.com/lisajean9

 

I didn’t really look for anything specific in these P.E teachers I just needed P.E teachers that work in the United States of America. I looked through the profiles of all of these teachers to see if they were going to be helpful in my studies and they all were. To my advantage none of these teachers had a very big amount of followers so it was fairly easy to contact them. What I really wanted to know about P.E was how different P.E teachers teach P.E. I asked the P.E teachers about their different P.E activities, their different P.E alternatives, how they impact students and I also asked about the philosophy of some P.E activities/exercises. Overall almost all of my experts responded and they gave me the information I wanted and I made sure to give them a “ Thank You” tweet after they responded on my tweet. I made sure to ask my questions in a polite way. I told the experts I greeted the expert,  I told them why I needed the information and then I asked my question. I believe that since I asked the questions in such a polite way, it made the experts understand that I was actually taking them seriously and I really just wasn’t trying to waste their time. I am very happy that the experts responded and gave me the answers I wanted because now I can use the first hand information to help me with my Genius Hour Project because first hand information is always very useful and it is more credible then second hand information.

 

I truely believe that this project was useful because the experts actually responded and gave me the information I wanted. I am happy to have been able to use twitter in a educative way that will and can benefit my learning. Like I said before, almost all of the experts responded to what I said and also almost all of them gave me a link to some information that I might be interested about. My relationship with the experts was very respectful and sort of friendly but none of them followed me back. And as soon as I stopped the Twitter Expert Connect Assignment I stopped contacting the experts and I haven’t tweeted any of them since. I don’t really know what else there is to talk about. I believe I already got what I needed, they gave me the answers I wanted and some offered more assistance and some gave me links to where I could find more information. But I do think that I might do this again on my own in the future if I really want to know something. I can even use this to get some information for a research paper. But for now I’m just going to use the Google Search Engine.

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