Tweetdeck coolness!

Number 3--I'm on a roll now! #MTBoS30

I finally figured out Tweetdeck!
I know, sometimes these things take a while to sink in.
I first signed up for a twitter account two years ago at a summer camp for technology users.  I didn't use it.  I logged in a few times (mostly while the camp was going on), then nothing...  When I finally decided to try logging in again, I couldn't get in.  I don't know exactly what happened, but I obviously didn't care enough to fix the problem because that was it.  I probably still have that account--who knows?
Fast forward a year to the same summer camp circa 2015 now.  There was a session on using Twitter, so I thought "Doggone it! I'm going to figure this thing out."
I attended the session.  Still couldn't figure out how to get into the original account, so opened a new one under a different e-mail.  Only this time, they introduced me to the concept of using twitter as PD.  You don't just follow random people you know, you follow people you can learn something from.  Right away, I looked up Dan Meyer and Jo Boaler and followed them.  Then I went to Dan's web page and followed several people in his Blogulty lounge.  Through their tweets, I found out about #ShadowCon.  I followed all of the speakers.  Then I found #MTBoS and learned how to search out a hashtag to see what was going on there.  It all just snowballed into all this personal PD, inspiration and enthusiasm over the last year.
In that same session last summer, they introduced us to the idea of tweetdeck.  It seemed like a cool way to do twitter, but I just didn't get it.  I hadn't used twitter long enough to understand why I might want to use it, so the several times I opened it up because the presenter had told me I should use it, I just didn't see why it was so important.
Finally, the other day I had a thought... "It would be cool if I could follow a hashtag on twitter."
So I googled "how do you follow a hashtag on twitter?"
You guessed it--tweetdeck!
I now have tweetdeck set up with columns to follow #MTBoS, #T3Learns, the BlogBot (I love that thing), and several other hashtags.
I still tend to scroll down my twitter feed most days, but tweetdeck is a great way to catch all the activity on one specific hashtag or follow a chat.