I know many of you read the title are were thinking, “Huh? I don’t use Twitter the same ways as Google.”  Courtesy of dictionary.com, consider the following definition:

Amazing how a company name, is now an action verb, and one that is part of common culture.  We google anything and everything.  I google solutions to tech issues, hiking trails in the area to try, and what to make for dinner with what is left in the refrigerator.  It is so easy to find answers to so many different things with just a few clicks of the keyboard.

However, on Friday Nancy Blair (@blairteach) inspired my thoughts for the focus of this post:

I saw this post and responded with a few tips from my personal experiences recently with Bluetooth connectivity issues.  Luckily, these ideas helped Nancy solve her problem.   This interaction is not unusual I realized.  Just a day before I had posted:

Within minutes, I heard from Robert Kelly (@robertk600) who was willing to connect and share his experiences.  Later that night during #isedchat (Independent School Ed Chat) with Lorri Caroll (@lcaroll94) a per chance side conversation led to Mark Crotty (@crottymark) also becoming a great resource to my call for information.

Daily there are questions and requests going between the wonderful educators that connect on Twitter.  There are calls for study participation, Mystery Skypes, global classroom collaborations, and reply tweets to show the worldwide scope of Twitter.  Educators answer without a further thought, but to be helpful, just as we would for questions from students in our schools.  That is who we are and what we do.  What I realized is that Twitter is that place to search for answers just like Google.  Getting answers and information is one of the powerful components of Twitter, along with the power that a #PLN (Personal Learning Network) can provide to discuss and collaborate solutions.

On Twitter we are all experts and we are all learners.  There are people who have experiential knowledge, areas they have explored to build their own learning, and there are those that have studied and built their base of information.  However, none of us has all the answers.  What we do have in the connected education community is the power to share and learn from each other for the betterment of our students, our colleagues, and the education field as a whole.  So next time you have a question or need some inspiration don’t “Google It”, but rather “Twitter It”!  You will not only find a supportive base of information, you will likely make some wonderful new connections.