Every week on Twitter I mark a series of tweets as favorites. These are tweets that have either interesting links, encourage thought-provoking conversations, spark some sentiment within me, or need to be read more thoroughly. My Personal Learning Network (PLN) on Twitter is full of educators who consistently engage me in conversation. These individuals ignite within me a need to continually strive to be a better educator and reflect upon my instructional practices. Due to various time zones or highly active Twitter streams we may miss the chance to participate in conversations or miss important links. Therefore, I will post five of my favorite tweets each week. Hopefully, you will be introduced to some new people you were not following before who would benefit your PLN. These are in order of occurrence with the first tweet being the earliest tweet in the week.
Goodbye Geocities
I really enjoyed this tweet by the Kenny Christian, EnglishProfi, because I was able to reminisce with othersĀ about our first website beginnings. David Truss and I had a similar conversation later in the week. I think many will be slightly saddened by this event. Geocities was the first hosting site I used to create a website when I first began college. Back then animated gifs were the hot items and I had plenty on my website. Needless to say I have come a long way from that time. Click here for to find out what to do with your Geocities account.

Language Learning in Second Life
SecondLife is the latest technology I have been learning for educational purposes. Nik Peachey’s tweet provides a link highlights the amazing possibilities SecondLife provides for learning languages. The program offers the student a language learning experience akin to traveling abroad. The student gets a roommate from China, creates an Ecological part in China, and is immersed in Chinese culture all from the comfort of a computer screen. Click here to try this learning experience for free in the month of August!

Parent Edtech Workshops
Thomas Whitby is well known for his thought-provoking tweets. I liked this idea so much I went to my school administrators and asked them if I could hold an educational technology workshop for my young English language learner’s parents. Click here for the link!

Collaborative Mindmapping Tool
I discovered this really cool mindmapping tool through Aniya, TheEngTeacher! Aniya is well known for feeding teachers on Twitter. The link she provides is to Richard Byrne’s blog post about Slate Box, a collaborative mindmapping tool. This tool has several uses for class projects, distance learning, e-learning, and so forth. Can’t wait to use this tool for my online classes. Click here for the link!

One Comment A Day Project
The last of this series of tweets comes from Steven Anderson, web20classroom. Steven provides information about the One Comment a Day project in which each person commits to posting at least one comment to encourage a new blogger. Then the person tweets the link to the blog post with the hashtag #OCP. I added my name to the list and encourage you to do the same. For more information on this project visit Steven Anderson’s post by clicking here!

If you enjoyed this post, you may also want to check out these posts with more favorite tweets:
- Gr8 Edu-tweets by Karenne Sylvester, Kalinagoenglish.
- June’s Best Tweets by Larry Ferlazzo.
Your challenge:
Explore these links and follow these Twitterers. Don’t know what to say to them? Just tell them you thought their links were extremely helpful and you heard about them from ShellTerrell!

Facebook/ShellyTerrell
Linkedin/shellyterrell
Twitter/shellterrell
YouTube/shellterrell
Del.icio.us/shellterrell
GMail/ShellyTerrell
Technorati/shellyterrell


Shelly,
I’m impressed that you’re going to do this every week — once a month is my max!
Thanks for recommending my post…
Larry
Hi Shelly,
This is a great way to highlight real people and how useful Twitter can be to us all. Respect!
Kenny
Thanks for doing this, it’s very useful to have a round up of the week’s good tweets
Great work! Thanks for putting this together!
What a great idea. Now I won’t have to worry about missing the week’s Twitter highlights!
Love the new blog look, by the way
Great idea! Will come back for more! I must remember to *favorite the tweets I’m always hunting for.
Thanks everyone for the great feedback! This is the first post I have done, since my new blog got a makeover. Thank you for welcoming the new blog with such nice comments!
I remember after creating my geocities account, I thought for some reason that it was geocites and couldn’t find it again:-)
This is a great way to demonstrate the power of Twitter as a learning network and free, any time, anywhere professional development.
Well done Shelly!
David,
I still remember another site with them and I lost the password so I could never retrieve the images or posts! This was a much better poetry site than the first. Oh well!
What a great idea. With so many great Twitterers out there, it’s becoming all too easy to miss important posts. Page is bookmarked for weekly visits.
Chris,
Thanks for the kudos! I also find that sometimes we miss engaging discussions or links since we were on a different time zone! Of course I seem to be a twitterholic so I do catch many of them! LOL!
Congratulations, Shelly, on what you’ve created here!!!!!!
I’m sure it’ll be a useful tool for our teaching-learning process and our professional development.
Regards from Argentina,
Marisa
Marisa,
Glad to have you all the way from Argentina! I am glad you enjoyed the post!
Very good post and one reason I added this blog to my reader. I will look forward to hearing about the best tweets of your week. I sometimes lose track of the actual tweet while leap frogging from one post to the next link provided and so I never get the posts starred the way I want.
poulingail,
Welcome to my PLN! I often have the same problems. Tweetdeck has helped enormously but I think writing this post will help me to reflect on some incredible Tweets!
Thanks so much for sharing these! I definitely also need to start marking favorites. I look forward to checking back for more inspiration! I am really interested in the idea of holding parent edtech workshops as well. We all know their is great wealth in educating parents but the logistics often get in the way. Keep us posted on your progress in that arena.
@Joan Young, I saw that post as well and haven’t wrapped my brain around it yet. I look forward to hearing more about edtech “workshops” for parents. Learning is so much fun!
Great information! I plan to visit weekly and share with other teachers at my school.
Greenie1903,
Thank you for sharing with the teachers at your school! I think many educators, who do not yet use Twitter, may not realize Twitter’s potential for problem solving. This is in addition to its usefulness for professional development.