Twitter--young but getting wiser #MTBoS Challenge 2

In the past couple of weeks I've been challenging myself to actually participate in some of the conversations going on on Twitter.  Historically, I would read them and think they were interesting, but not necessarily toss in my two cents.  The MTBos (Math Twitter Blog o Sphere)...mostly blogs for me in the past...has offered me so much.  I feel ready to start giving back and being more active.

On Saturday afternoon of TMC13 (Twitter Math Camp), David Wees @davidwees and Justin Lanier @j_lanier schooled me on why I might want to dive into the Twitter World to participate in the MTBoS.  "It's like a dinner party with tons of people that you admire," David said.  "You can ask people about their cool ideas directly. It's the best faculty lounge there is."  I have Facebook (though I don't really love it...I mostly just feel jealous and lazy when I read it) and I wasn't sure why I would want to add another platform like that to my life.  After TMC13, though, I couldn't imagine not being about to continue the conversations that I had had with folks there.

Although I still feel very young in the MTBoS world, last night as I read some posts from new folks, I was realizing how much I've learned from this community, how much I have grown in the last several years as a teacher:
-Instituted Standards Based Grading in my ninth grade
-Convinced my entire department (and got the admin team to consider it school-wide) to use SBG
-Felt supported and in good company as I think about new ideas
-Know a ton more acronyms  :-)
-Inspired to start thinking about Interactive Student Notebooks
-Huge files full of lesson and method ideas

If the MTBoS were a foreign language, I would be conversational, not quite proficient and still striving for fluent.  I love that there is always more to learn, always new ideas and concepts to explore.  Through Twitter I hope to challenge my fears of writing and jump more fully into the conversations.

Last night, my partner, @adkpiper, and I explored how replying to tweets affects who gets to see them.  He even wrote a blog post about it:  http://www.holliseaster.com/p/why-are-tweets-missing/