Twitter for Professional Development
One of best and worst things about teaching today is the unbelievably unfathomable amount of online resources, tools, websites, lesson plans, and overall good stuff for teaching and learning. However, there are only so many hours and minutes in the day to spend researching and finding resources that are relevant to your life as a teacher. How do you keep up with it all? Simply put: Twitter.
There is nothing better than having a good group of “goto” people that you can turn to with questions about resources, bounce ideas off of for lessons and projects, and collaborate with on a regular basis. Hopefully you have a team of people in your school or district who you work with that serve this purpose, but wouldn’t it be great if you could also find a more global group of like-minded teachers to broaden your horizons a bit?
Twitter to the rescue! This is the absolutely first place I go for answers, professional development, feedback on an idea, etc. However, this just doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a bit of work to build up a nice group of Twitter followers, but its not hard work. Firstly, make sure you have completed your Twitter biography with information that explains who you are and what you are interested in learning from others. Then, simply start with ONE educator that you would like to follow on Twitter. Then, click on that person’s list of followers and follow a few. Then, click on their followers, so forth and so on. Before you know it, you will be following hundreds of people and they most likely will follow you back and you will have built your online group of “goto” educators!
In addition to just following educators and others with the same interests as you, there are several different hashtags that you can follow that revolve around the educational realm. Hashtags such as #edchat and #teaching can be seen all over Twitter these days. Clicking on a hashtag brings up a search of all such tags and can be an awesome way to follow or jump into a twitter conversation about certain topic.
Check out the links below for some help in getting start with Twitter as an educator. Sooner than later you will be asking and answering questions with the best of them!
- What is Twitter? Wikispace
- Twitter for Teachers
- 36 Interesting Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom
- A-Z Dictionary of Educational Hashtags
- Twitter4Teachers
- Top 100 Tools for the Twittering Teacher
- Nine Reasons to Twitter in School
Just starting out on Twitter? Follow our team: @edismylife, @diannekrause, @ajjuliani, @stevenjmogg @mrgabriele13, @dhasty
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Thanks for the recent shoutout on Twitter! Have a great new year!
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