Twitter



Alongside Facebook, the best known social media platform.

www.twitter.com twitter.com/darrengibb @darrengibb


 * Allows messages - or 'tweets' - up to 140 characters long.
 * An excellent medium to communicate with fellow teachers - arguably the best CPD available (and I know people who count their dealings on twitter as part of their thirty five hours!)
 * Full of thousands of teachers worldwide with similar ideas around the world. Resources and ideas are free to share (and done so daily). TES, Guardian Education, TeachIt and many, many others are all on twitter and regularly update.
 * Good for keeping up to date with ever-changing educational policy/curriculum development.
 * Form your PLN - Personal Learning Network - by following certain users (following @darrengibb will let you see who I all follow). It is a case of following people, seeing if they 'float your boat' so to speak and then seeing who they follow and so on. This is what twitter is most useful for. It then updates you with whoever you are following's latest tweets. Many links are shared through twitter (but shortened using things like bit.ly so as not to take up so many of the 140 character limit per message.
 * I use twitter for professional life and Facebook for social - I think it is important not to mix the two!


 * People will place hashtags (#) in their messages:



In the above example, I have included the hashtag #ukedchat. This means that this tweet will be sent to all of my followers and ALSO the hashtag ukedchat. A hashtag is like a room. If I search for #ukedchat, the following appears (on the right hand side). My tweet appears amongst others who are concerned with #ukedchat and who have put #ukedchat into their message.



Within minutes, one of my followers (it sounds like a cult - it's not!) had posted a message in reply:



This highlights the immediacy of twitter; within minutes I had a response to my post. This is the same when posting a question to your PLN. Like anything else in life you get out what you put in. At the same time, you don't have to regularly tweet to reap the benefits of following active tweeters and seeing the links to resources or ideas that they post.

The following are youtube videos that will help to guide you through twitter:

media type="youtube" key="0qqDy5BmYKE" height="315" width="560" An outline to twitter.

media type="youtube" key="KIsKcac_CYQ" height="315" width="420" Twitter Tutorial

media type="youtube" key="nHr4tsDHptM" height="315" width="560" Ideas on how to use twitter in the classroom (American).