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How Teachers Can Stop Being Scared Of Twitter

How Teachers Can Stop Being Scared Of Twitter
November’s EdTechTeacher’s iPad Summit (which, by the way, I found through Twitter) completely amazed, overwhelmed, challenged, and inspired me. I left feeling empowered about the 1:1 iPad environment in which I was teaching and excited about the possibilities of technology inside and outside of my classroom. My Twitter Addiction I also left the conference with a mild addiction to Twitter. Mild as in I stopped taking notes within the first 5 minutes of the keynote when I realized that I could just tweet the links for great resources, apps, articles, images, videos… And went from following one or two people to dozens of the brightest stars in the edtech realm – including the EdTechTeacher staff and some pretty amazing teachers I met at the conference. Like I said, it was a *mild* addiction. It’s A Conversation But it was more than just a running list of sites to check out and apps to investigate. The Personal Learning Network Hashtags Ahoy! Connect To Your Passion(s)

22 Effective Ways To Use Twitter In The Classroom Using Twitter in the classroom is a no-brainer. It’s a powerful and free tool that already has wide adoption among educators, students, administrators, and parents. So how do you effectively use Twitter to resonate with students? Why not start by using the following methods that are organized by Bloom’s Taxonomy? The below visual showcases a variety of cases that should be of use for any teacher looking to effectively integrate Twitter into courses, lessons, projects, etc. What if you could use your favorite social network in the classroom? That’d be the cat’s pajamas. (For our many international readers not familiar with that term, it simply means ‘that’d be great.’) You can actually use Twitter with Bloom’s Taxonomy thanks to this below table built by TeachBytes .

Personal Learning Networks for Educators: 10 Tips By Dr. Mark Wagner I often begin my workshop on personal learning networks (PLN) for educators by asking these questions: Who is in your learning network? Who do you learn from on a regular basis? I usually ask these questions at conferences, which are frequently only annual events – and rare treats for many educators. Learning to Network and Networking to Learn 1. 2. 3. 4. Networking Tools and Anecdotes The four tips above are the core activities of building a personal learning network, and they can be applied using various tools to connect with others online. 5. 6. 7. 8. Final Thoughts These final two tips will help keep your initial frustrations in perspective, and help you avoid the temptation to focus on unimportant metrics as you grow your network. 9. 10. Note: For more on this topic, you might also want to explore Jeff Utecht’s book Reach: Building Communities and Networks for Professional Development. Note: I’ve also been writing about this topic for some time.

A Comprehensive Index to Educational Hashtags Teachers Must Know about If you are still trying to figure out what educational hashtags teachers are using then you do not need to go anywhere else, I got it covered here thanks to Chiew Pang document. Pang created an open document using Google Docs and named it " The Unofficial Index to Twitter Hashtags ". I have gone thorough the entire page and found it really helpful so I thought you might want to have a look as well. See also : Teacher's Guide to The Use of Hashtags in Education Here is the link for the entire document that Pang created and below are the hashtags it contains. Besides hashtags the document also features several important tips on how and why to use educational hashtags .

Guide To Twitter Twitter has proven itself to be an indispensable tool for educators around the globe. Whatever skill level you may be, Twitter is downright fun and worth your time. So here’s a useful guide that we curated from Edudemic’s archives in an effort to put something together that was a bit easier to read than random blog posts. Our Biggest Twitter Tips For Teachers For many teachers making a foray into the edtech world, Twitter is an excellent tool for consuming and learning. Many are also harnessing Twitter as a part of their PLN (personal learning network) to connect, share, and network. Check out our biggest Twitter tips for teachers below! Create, Don’t Just Consume The best way to get the most out of Twitter is to use it. Connect and Network When you’re just getting started on Twitter (or perhaps trying to add to or refine your feed), a resource for educational hashtags or guides to great accounts to follow are excellent resources to point you in the right direction. Share Your Resources

Guide to Twitter in the K-8 Classroom  Twitter, without a doubt, has become the social network for educators to take their professional development into their own hands. Twitter allows teachers to connect with other educators from around the world, join discussions related to their interests and have a steady stream of resources (to help them teach and learn) available to them whenever, whereever and however. Creating a network on Twitter has catapulted educators to be part of a connected world where learning happens anytime, help is only a tweet away, collaboration partners meet and communicate, conversations that directly or indirectly impact their physical lives take place 24/7. Twitter is helping educators gain many 21st century skills and literacies which could easily transfer to their classrooms. So the next question is… How do you bring Twitter into your K-8 Classroom? If your students are under the age of 13, they cannot create their own Twitter account (Minimum Age Restriction). Related 21. In "Collaboration" 3. 14.

Twitter as a Curation Tool | Langwitches Blog I have written and spoken extensively about the use of Twitter in education: In addition to the above mentioned uses of Twitter, I am increasingly becoming aware of the importance of Twitter as a CURATION tool for me. The term “curation” in itself has become quite popular recently. Mike Fisher has blogged about curation and what it means versus the concept of collection. Collecting is what kids do when asked to find resources for a particular topic. Mike created the following image to point out the continuum from collecting to curating The stages and progression of using Twitter as a mere consumption tool of collected information (by others) to curating information, adding value with additional perspectives, connections, resources or interpretation, the platform of Twitter as a potential tool for curation becomes evident. There are different sides to Twitter as a Curation tool: Download Twitter as a Curation Tool as a pdf file. Ex Follow #hashtags of topics or groups. Ex.

How (And Why) To Try Twitter Teams In School Twitter can give a school district’s constituents—parents, community members, students and teachers—a real-time peek into the working lives of administrators and teachers and into the amazing projects students are working on daily. It is an instantaneous platform for communicating what reading material you find interesting, which teachers are doing innovative things in classrooms, displays of school spirit and of technology integration, showcases of community service and more. According to Washington Post columnist Michael S. Rosenwald, who featured Montgomery County (Maryland) schools chief and principals engaged on Twitter in a 2011 story, “Twitter is an interesting technological outlet for administrators, allowing them an unfiltered way to communicate insights into how they manage, what makes them tick and what tactics might be useful to adapt elsewhere.” How To Create Twitter Teams In School Districts The Big Problem

Paradigm Shift: Thoughts of A Young Twitter PLN User - Teaching With Tech In Mind Twitter isn't new to me. In fact, out of the 1.5 billion twitter accounts I am number 14,440,832. I joined Twitter in April of 2008. I've gotten to connect to some pretty impressive people in my little world of southeast Texas (here, here, and here). I don't say these stats to boast but to tell you that I've been around 140 Character land for quite some time. My twitter account @jportier (This is my personal twitter account, my professional is @Mr_Portier) How I came to use twitter to create my PLN:My district annually holds their technology conference the week before ISTE.

Using Twitter for Teachers' Professional Development I am actually engaged in an extensive review of the literature written on the use of Twitter as a Personal Learning Network ( PLN ).Twitter is the core topic of my MAEd thesis and I am trying to approach it from different perspectives : academic, social, and even personal ( for professional development ). Academically speaking, papers investigating the use of Twitter in the world of academia are still scarce and the empirical research done in this field is still very limited. From time to time I feature some of the resources I am actually reading and which I know will be of great interest to my readers here in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning.For instance, today I am sharing with you a treasure trove ( I really mean it ) of Twitter lists to subscribe with and follow to stay updated about the latest news, resources, links, researches, and many more according to your area of interest.

Using Twitter in a Primary Classroom It's funny, I've been using twitter a fair bit with my students this past year but as I went to find a post about it to share with a colleague on twitter I discovered I've never actually blogged about it. It's time to fix that. My class and I have used twitter as an incredible connecting, sharing, and learning tool. We've used it for many different purposes and the reality is there is always another way we could be using it. The great thing about Twitter is that it's one of the easiest ways to bring the world into your classroom. It's available for access from almost every where in the world. To begin with I've created a class twitter account at @MsLsClass. But what do we tweet? Other times we use twitter for specific purposes. This term we also tweeted out math story problems to the hashtag #mathstory which we created as a class. We also used twitter this year to connect with people. We also used twitter when we were learning about voice.

Tweeting Your way to Academic Success Twitter is one of those pieces of technology that people either love or hate. For the haters, it seems like a superfluous, narcissistic, even petty platform through which people who think they are more important than they really are share their most intimate details with the world. For those who love the medium, it is a way of filtering and digesting a vast world of digital information quickly and efficiently. Some even see it as a possible vehicle for changing the world. Others have begun using Twitter in education with positive results. A recent report from The Education Forum, Twitteracy: Tweeting as a New Literacy Practice, sheds some light on the debate over whether Twitter is a major time waster or a valuable educational tool for developing technological literacy. Twitteracy Findings, No Surprise Literacy as a general concept has changed dramatically in the Information Age. The best way to understand how any hi-tech tool could benefit your students is to begin using it yourself.

5 Ways Twitter Can Help in Education - Getting Smart by Guest Author - edchat, social media, twitter By: Pamela Rossow If you are in an educational field as a student, teacher, or parent, you may have wondered about the benefits of social media—specifically Twitter. All that tweeting seems like it could give you a headache. What if Twitter was more than just a way to dish about the amazing Caprese salad you had at lunch and actually a way to help students learn better? Here are 5 ways that Twitter may enhance learning . . . Class participation. Projects. Outside in. Networking. Finding information. Education and Twitter can be synonymous if Twitter is used in a way that benefits educators and students. Pamela Rossow is a freelance writer who works with higher education clients such as eLearners.

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. What’s the point of posting if no one is ever listening?” 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. 3.

Teachers – The 10 Stages of Twitter | dedwards.me Stage 1 Sign up to twitter following persuasion/pestering by colleagues. Follow Stephen Fry, a famous sportsman/popstar and a news channel. Read a few tweets, don’t understand what the fuss is about and mock anyone who uses twitter. Stage 2 Overhear colleagues chatting about twitter and a great article they found. Stage 3 Think about posting first tweet. Stage 4 Upon realising you have no followers ask colleagues how to get them? Stage 5 Have a mini twitter conversation with colleague, even retweet a couple of statements. Stage 6 Practise a couple of tweets that include @names and hashtags. Stage 7 Retweet any link you find interesting as people might read them. Stage 8 Thank colleagues for introducing you to twitter, impressed with the knowledge you have gleaned and your growing number of followers. Stage 9 Reflect that twitter is an incredibly positive place and everyone is full of praise. Stage 10 (the reason for this post) When seeking opinion from a range of people, ask PLN to respond.

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