Blog Post PLN Reflection #3 Microblog

Alice Keeler lists herself in her Twitter bio as “Mom of 5, Math Teacher, Youcubed consultant, Author, Speaker, Google Certified Innovator, T3 Trainer, NMCk12 Ambassador, MIE, gamification, #coffeeEDU, coder”. She joined Twitter in October 2010. Alice Keeler is someone I began following when I first started using Twitter in 2010. I also met her in person at ISTE 2014. She provides many userful resources to teachers using Google Classroom and Google Apps for Education. Alice has over 170,000 followers, but some find Alice Keeler controversial. She is known to tweet out complaints about her childrens’ teachers, including this tweet of a gif she created of burning her child’s interactive student notebook.

joyfully BURNED the "interactive" science notebook. Gluing is not learning. pic.twitter.com/uesyvAISg2

— Alice Keeler (@alicekeeler) July 17, 2017

She has also made the blanket statement that no homework should ever be given, receiving criticism from other teachers who use homework to reinforce learning rather than as a punishment for assessment.

Keeler also received backlash when she marketed masks during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I have a bag of these face masks. Now to decide what to do with them. pic.twitter.com/D1B8t6xVxo

— Alice Keeler (@alicekeeler) May 20, 2020

Perhaps the most disturbing issue with Alice Keeler happened in June 2020. Either Alice or someone in her camp created a fake Twitter account and impersonated @jennthetutor. Jenn reached out to Alice to ask that the account be suspended. Keeler later apologized, but was slow to reply to @jennthetutor.

You replied to other people and did live tweets. You responded on your org page

In the blog post I outlined what I wanted. I refuse to let you pretend you didn’t not see this. You acknowledged it- I have tagged you multiple times.

Don’t insult me pic.twitter.com/vl2Q3R1GFn

— jennthetutor 🎓 👩🏾‍🏫 #TestFreeNow (@jennthetutor) June 4, 2020

@jennthetutor's official statement on all that happened can be viewed here.

Keeler is a big personality and does create useful resources for teachers who may be new to implementing educational technology. However, I would not recommend her to other teachers to follow. I would not find this account valuable to follow, nor the other two accounts suggested in this course. I prefer to follow other teachers in my content area on Twitter, rather than "big name" personalities or websites like Edutopia. Twitter can be a wonderful resource for teachers if they follow users who have positive things to share, including asking for help, when the lesson doesn't work, and general collaboration suggestions. Twitter is a great thinktank no matter what time of day. Using a hashtag can provide specialized tweets so that others see what you are tweeting.Personally, I prefer Instagram or Facebook as a microblog of sorts. Twitter seems to be a sounding board of frustration of teachers in 2020-2021. There are still some good teachers to follow on Twitter, but my main source of microblogging is not Twitter.