Brian Aspinall
Teacher, Speaker, Coder, Maker Menu

Twitter – The P2P Network For Educators

I have been an active twitter-er since 2009 and have tweeted over 20,000 times. I’m not sure that is something to be proud of but I will archive it one of these days for a good laugh. Maybe I’ll publish it to some dorky book. “The tweets of Brian Aspinall”. Not worth reading…

For me Twitter is P2P downloading for educators. It’s the napster, limewire, utorrent, whatever for underground lessons and materials. Indie stuff. Good stuff. It’s a place to scrape the surface of some greater underlying learning in 140 characters. It’s sharing from the bottom up. Grassroots. What is happening and what is working in classrooms today.

I use twitter (and tweetdeck) to follow certain people and certain hashtags. Tweetdeck allows you to create more than one twitter feed timeline in your browser which is ideal during twitter chats.

I use twitter to share. I use twitter to learn. I use twitter to see a window into other classrooms. I use twitter to generate ideas. I use twitter for feedback. Twitter is on my phone – essentially attached to my hip all day long. I use twitter to capture student learning. I use twitter to share. I use twitter to learn….

Yesterday I came across an interesting tweet from Donna Miller Fry:

Donna is someone I admire and follow closely. Does that sound creepy?

I also follow Andrew Campbell:

He always offers his opinions and loves to challenge perspectives.

Kristen Wideen is a good friend of mine. I enjoy seeing her little ones in action.

I first met Jonathon So back at ECOO this past November. We share many of the same views on assessment and learning as well as a love of mathematics.

I always get to see what is happening in his class and I wonder what those students would be like by the time they got to intermediate.

Doug Peterson is a former teacher of mine. Someone I have followed for close to a decade now. He is the curator of all curators but what makes him unique is the content he gathers and shares is from Ontario. He seems to find all #onted tweeters from all the nooks and crannies of the province.

David Fife is an administrator from London.

Peter Skillen is a maker. Or maybe he’s not. I can never tell. I think he codes…Or does he?

Bill Forrester is an instructional coach in Hamilton. He is one who always seeks out his #pln for help to share with colleagues during workshops.

Aviva Dunsiger is the Queen of twitter having posted more than 100,000 tweets. I have personally read every one of them. 🙂 – All kidding aside, Aviva loves to share ideas, post comments and challenge herself in her learning. There is a humbleness in her tweets.

Brandon Grasley is a teacher from the north. Far north. He’s a techie guy interested in math. He has compiled lists himself.

David Carruthers is a teacher from St Thomas.

Kyle Pearce has some great math stuff. I would suggest taking a peak.

I could go on and on. There is a lot of great stuff happening here in Ontario. Many of you reading this already know. You can see from the people I follow closely that their tweets are very surface level in terms of the content they are sharing. Usually accompanied with a link, we can all learn about what is happening in their world. Interesting to note that they all blog too and you should check our their sites.

If you are new to twitter, here are 31 Ontario accounts worth following.

Of course, you can find me at @mraspinall.

Back to my P2P analogy. It’s difficult to download without seeders. If we all leech, we won’t see many results. Please seed and share.

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