Another Reason for Twitter

Hey everyone,

I’m getting worse at keeping my blog updated… I’ve been wanting to add something to this for a while because I haven’t liked that the first post people see when they come here starts with ‘Shameless Promotion!’. That’s just tacky.

So – in an effort to move that from the top of my front page, I want to write about Twitter. In particular, I want to write about one person on twitter: Alexis Huicochea. This person is 90% of the reason I still use twitter today.

Alexis isn’t a teacher or educator. She’s not someone that I follow for professional development – that’s the other 10% of why I use twitter. I’ve never met her in person, nor have we ever had a conversation on twitter. Alexis works for the local newspaper in my city – she writes primarily about local education. I like reading her articles because they keep me informed about local educational news – things happening with districts and stuff. Most cities probably have this – that’s not a big deal.

Here’s the big deal: Alexis Live-Tweets Every School Board Meeting.

And they are fascinating. They are enlightening. They catch things that don’t make it into the newspapers. They are, at times, hilarious. Seriously – check out this gem right here.

There’s a lot going on these days in education policy – changes to statewide assessments, funding issues, unions & tenure – all sorts of stuff. The more I know about what’s happening in my district, the better. And I can’t think of a better way to get that info unfiltered and raw, which is what I want. I don’t want the boiled-down bullet points for the general public – I want to know what’s up for discussion and where people are leaning. I want to know what might be coming down the pipeline because these people affect me directly. I want to be informed damnit.

So – if you’re a teacher on twitter, I encourage you to find someone in your area who does this same thing. Maybe this is common and I’m late to the game. Or maybe this is the start of a trend that I hope starts to pick up – live-tweeting school board meetings so we all know what’s going on.

Actually – here’s a question for you, reader of this post: are there any journalists in your area that go to board meetings and tweet the results? Do any school districts in your area do this voluntarily? If not, why not? Why don’t more people do this? Can we get more people to do this?

Lastly, for the record, I live in Tucson, AZ and I follow Alexis because she live-tweets the Tucson Unified School Board (TUSD) meetings, which is one of the largest districts in the state. So if you live here too, you should give her a follow. Ironically, I don’t teach in this district anymore and no one live-tweets the school board meetings from my district. I wish someone would.

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