My thoughts on Twitter

Although I am familiar with the use of social media, spending mindless hours watching and sending memes and reels on Instagram, I must admit I did struggle with my introduction into Twitter. Personally, I have used Instagram and Facebook to stay in contact with friends I don’t see often, sharing funny content and every once in a while something meaningful. Entering the Twitter world I did not know anyone, other than my professor who assigned the assignment. It felt more intimidating entering this realm of social media, I was more selective with who I was following since they were not anyone I knew on a personal level. I paid more attention to their profile, their posts, and who they followed before I began to follow them or retweeted them. After a while I was able to more quickly vet profiles and focus on articles and posts that interested me in the educational field.

The task of tweeting at least 120 meaningful tweets was daunting but once I got into the rhythm of tweeting, retweeting, and commenting I could appreciate the platform as a networking tool and the goal seemed more attainable. I connected with individuals from all around with similar mindsets as me. A highlight from my experience was getting retweeted by Dr. José Medina, a highly respected international leader in the dual language world, who has close to 2,000 followers. It was an exciting yet nerve wrecking moment knowing that I was accessible to so many people, but in the lens of networking, it was great exposure. Moving forward I think I will continue to use Twitter solely as an education account. Overall I think this experience was a positive one; I appreciated finding articles and resources that were relevant to my career path and hope to connect with even more professionals with time.

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What does flexible seating look like in the classroom?

As I begin my school year off in a new grade level there are lots of changes and adjustments that I must confront. One big change that is undeniably visible is the use of desks!!! When I taught Kindergarten my seating was flexible in the sense that no student had an actual assigned seat, but instead would rotate through centers and chose a seat at the table they were assigned to be at in that moment. As I walked into my into my new 2nd grade classroom I almost forgot that desks would be involved. Thinking back to my own 2nd grade desk experience, and honestly the majority of my primary school experience, I remember the rigidness of rows facing the black board! I knew for sure that is not what I wanted to do, but also felt a bit at a loss of what it "should" look like. I picked at my colleagues' mind in the building and got great ideas of how to clusters desks together. But, when I looked online for more ideas and inspiration I was greeted by the idea of flexible seating.

Calm-down Corner

While tweeting for my #EDUC502 class many tweets about began to show up on my feed about calm-down corners, here is one that served as inspiration for this blog. The use of calm-down corners seem to be popping up more and more in classrooms around my school building. The students' adjustment back to building from online learning has been accompanied by many behaviors. At all grade levels I have spoken with colleagues that have mentioned that they have noticed the increase of behaviors such as students being physical with one another and having outbursts during their class. I did not start the school year off with a calm-down corner in my classroom but hope to incorporate it by the start of the next marking period. After picking at many colleagues minds I have put together a few items and ideas I would like to include in mine. I have heard how successful these corners can be, although also it does bring up more questions on management. If you have a calm-down corner how do you use

Spanglish

Spanglish is a term that is used in the Hispanic community when a person is speaking and mixes both English and Spanish words, either creating new words like "troca" for truck or buy interchanging languages as they speak through out the same sentence. This is a term I am incredibly familiar with since it was a big no-no in my household growing up. Even now as a dual language teacher my mother will still regañarme when I do it, but sometimes it feels almost necessary. For example using the word "regañar" for me felt more familiar and accurate; I could have said "scold me" but it wouldn't have been as natural. While of course there are times and places to use specific language over I agree with Dr. José Medina's Twitter post when he speaks of that when people, like my mother, have issues with the use of Spanglish they are linguistic oppressors when in reality it is higher cognitive skill to do so. (Kim et al., 2021) The American school system see

La maestria

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