Connecting Voices

Sharing Ideas and Responsibility

I feel like the image above is the ideal situation in most areas of my life. Many people with their own voice and their own ideas coming together and eventually those circles overlapping. I love that this image is not just individuals with their own individual thoughts. Instead community is a mixture of individuals and their thoughts. Eventually each person has multiple colors representing voices and ideas in their bubble. This post is about connecting our voices. Of course collecting voices can have its down side. There are times when a decision has to be made and you have to have a clear voice. Many voices in those situations can be very detrimental to a task or an objective. The situations that I am mainly talking about are those where there is a collaboration. What I have noticed is that in those situations having only one voice can be detrimental. As an educator I am a part of a lot of collaboration that is actually just one voice. This one voice can have great ideas but everyone falls in line with their vision and normally take a back seat and don't feel responsible for the growth of a community. The many ideas and visions get lost and everyone seems to be focused on one person instead of the many skills and tools that the collective group can bring to the situation.

The image below shows a great example of what this one voice tends to look like:

So I am going to show you tool that I have begun to use to bring about a collective responsibility and a collection of voices. The first tool is something that we are all familiar with and that is Twitter. Social Media in general is a great tool for connecting with people all over the world. We decide how to use that tool to enhance us or bring us down. There are definitely many ways that Social Media has been used negatively, especially among high schoolers, but I am going to show you how to use Twitter in a productive way. 

Twitter allows you to use specific searches to find more information. These searches are used by hashtags (#). These hashtags are used to carry on a conversation with a specific theme. I have seen them used at weddings to tweet about the festivities to research projects that are used to connect with others that are familiar with the topic. 

1. The first thing you need to do is create a Twitter account. You can do that here.

2. Once you sign in you can then search for any topic you would like. For example I chose to look up espn by using #espn

After you select your topic anything with #espn tag will come up for you to explore

There are many groups and other things you can look up on Twitter. Below is a quick video tutorial on how to use Twitter for beginners.

Hopefully you begin to use Twitter and get connected with other people and hear many different ideas. Feel free to follow me @gbuckman4 and Happy Tweeting.