RILE # 6

Well folks, we have come to the last RILE update. If you have managed to follow along with me through my twitter failure, then you might be a little relieved that this journey has come to an end. I think I might be.

As we all know, Twitter and I do not get along, so I have refocused my RILEs to highlighting educators who have used Twitter well. Maybe you can then be inspired by their success, instead of my failures. Today, however, I am going to do something different. Today I am going to write about the power of the hash tag.

#

Hashtags on Twitter is a way to categorize all of the post about a certain subject. For example: everyone who posts tweets about Canada's Wonderland would hashtag #canadaswonderland and if you searched for that hashtag, your post would me among thousands of similar posts who also #canadaswonderland.

For educators, hashtags could be a very helpful tool when navigating Twitter to look at different posts. However, in my search, I have found that educators also use hashtags to have conversations. Here is what I found:

"Many of the hashtags have “meeting times” where educators agree to “meet and tweet”–that is, send out messages on a topic at a certain time on a certain day.

If you do participate at the agreed upon time, you’ll see the tweets stream in live and participate in said conversation (via twitter) in what is nearly real-time. But if you can’t make it, the great part about a hashtag is that it does the sorting for you. You can search for messages assigned to a given hashtag anytime–tomorrow, Sunday night, or during your planning period next week.

Note, this list of hashtags will be updated periodically, including reorganization, and functional linking on all hashtags."

I thought that was pretty cool, and a different way to look at the '#'.

Thanks for checking in!