3 tips for teachers new to Twitter SmartBlogs A colleague who knows that Twitter is my favorite social space stuck her head in my room the other day with a complaint. “Bill, Twitter’s not working for me. No one ever replies to any of my questions. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Anyone who has taken the digital leap into the Twitterstream has felt lost and unloved at some point in their early work to use the short messaging service as a learning tool. To convince similarly frustrated peers to give Twitter another chance, I always offer three bits of advice: 1. Educators have embraced hashtags — unique identifiers that start with the # sign — as a way to efficiently share information with each other. Following the hash-tagged resources that are filtered and sorted by other teachers will make the early time that you spend in Twitter worthwhile — and if the early time that you spend in Twitter is worthwhile, you’ll be more likely to continue tinkering with the service. 2. I probably should have known better, right? 3.
Why I try to follow every teacher I can on Twitter cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by stevegarfield Tony Baldasaro wrote a blog post yesterday that is getting a lot of attention regarding why he “unfollowed 5000 people on Twitter” and how he is going back to starting over. There is a lot of powerful thoughts in his post on how we actually connect with each other in this space: As I pressed unfollow 5,000 times, I realized that I didn’t know most of the folks that I was unfollowing. Now I don’t want to say Tony is wrong, and from my several meetings with him I can tell you he is an awesome guy, but I do want to offer a different perspective. Several years ago when I first started Twitter, I thought, like many do, that it was probably the dumbest thing ever. A year later, I was coaxed into trying it again and people blindly followed me knowing how I easily gave up on it in the first place. I even watch today as my brother asks people from his network to help him get others connected:
10 Ways Teachers Can Use Twitter for Professional Development This is our third consecutive post on Twitter. Now that you have a roadmap on how to use Twitter in your classroom and after you have identified with the different educational hashtags you need to follow as a teacher, let us share with you some ideas on how to leverage the power of this social platform for professional development purposes. Talking about using social networking to grow professionally brings to mind LinkedIn. This is an undeniably powerful network that is more professionally focused ( you can read more about the educational uses of LinkedIn HERE ) but Twitter has also its own attraction that we can not ignore. It a huge base of users and is probably much known among teachers and educators than LinkedIn. 1- Create a strong profile page The first thing to do is to let people know about you and your interests. 2- Keep your profile professional One of the mistakes some teachers do is that they create one account and share everything in it.
Top 25 Twitter Tips for Your Professional Development Although LinkedIn gets a lot of love as a professional social media site, Twitter is a force that can’t be ignored by up-and-coming young professionals. It’s a great place to get connected and informed, and an especially good resource for growing professionally. But how exactly can you use Twitter for professional development? Check out our list to find 25 different ways. Keep your Twitter profile employer-focused: Maximize the space that you have in your profile to share a professional description of yourself. Once you’ve started connecting and sharing on Twitter, consider how you’ll manage your presence on the site.
10 Steps to Kick Start Your Twitter Network Twitter Tips we should all know, and care, about #edchat I use Twitter a lot. Perhaps too much. I, like many others, have learned the hard way about hashtags, avatars, profiles, “tweetiquette” (or ‘twettiquette’), URL shorteners, keeping it real, keeping it professional, keeping it polite (well, I do), etc. Someone coming to Twitter now, all fresh and eager to get stuck in, might find it hard to find their own voice in the noise that the rest of us are making. Building a professional learning network on Twitter SmartBlogs Thanks for reading SmartBlog on Education’s Friday Feature. We’re here to help educators like you engage, innovate and discuss. This week, veteran educator and SmartBrief contributing editor Tom Whitby provides a framework for expanding your professional network using Twitter. For those who do not know, here are two basic Twitter principles: 1. If you only follow ten people, you will only see the general tweets of those ten people. 2. I often say that the worst advocates for using Twitter as a PLN are power users. Building a PLN consisting of quality educators, who responsibly share quality information and sources, takes time and requires a plan. How do you find those quality educators to follow in order to add value to your PLN? The very best sources for good people to follow on Twitter are the best people you already follow. Additionally, many tweeters have lists of people culled from all of their followers for the purpose of grouping. Hashtags add range to tweets.
Crowd Sourced Twitter Guide For Teachers This guide is specifically for teachers who are interested in finding out more about Twitter and even jumping in to the Twittersphere themselves. It is made up of a series of videos from teachers who use Twitter all the time, so it was 'crowd sourced.' Meaning people in the crowd each added a little until there was a whole. Pretty cool stuff really. You can hit the About page to find out who is responsible for all of this... :-) Anyway, on with it...
Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: How to Twitter in 60 Seconds Our Educational Twitter section here in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning is growing bigger and bigger. I know all of you have a Twitter account but I am not sure if you all use it for educational purposes or not and this is exactly why I created the section I mentioned earlier. I want those of you who still could not find their way through educational Tweeting to be able to learn how to use this social media first to grow professional and also to improve their teaching and learning. After going through the infographic below I decided to add it to our growing repository of Twitter resources.The graphic is a simple and easy guide that will walk you through the different steps you need to follow to tap into the educational potential of Twitter.
6 Best Twitter Tips Every Teacher should Know about I just came across this great graphic entitled 5 Best Twitter practices and I thought you might be interested to have a peek. Twitter as you know is a social networking website with a huge educational potential and Educational Technology and Mobile Learning has been posting a lot about it in the last couple of years. Check out the Twitter for Educators section we have here to learn more about how to use Twitter with your students, in your classroom or for your professional development. Have a look at the 6 practices included below and share with us what you think of them. Enjoy courtesy of edudemic