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As a teacher

• what do you need to know about Twitter,
• how do you use it,
• why is its useful for learning and teaching,
• When and where do you tweet?

What you need to know about Twitter?

1. Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others’ updates (known as tweets) (wikipedia)
2. Twitter was created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, so it’s a relatively new Web 2.0 application.
3. This is a great intro from the Common Craft people:
   
4. A tweet is like an SMS text message, but only 140 characters long, and Twitter is therefore sometimes described as SMS for the Internet (D’Monte)
5. Twitter has been ranked as the third most used  (Kazeniac) and as the fastest growing social network (Nielsen.com). So it looks like being around for a while yet, which makes it worth the investment of time needed to get to know any application.

How do you use it?

1. Create an account at twitter.com. Note that a form of a person’s real name is becoming increasingly used for their username, though many, like me, still use a nickname. Don’t make it too long as it forms part of the 140 character length.
2. Update your profile via [Settings]
   
   • Account Tab:
     • Add your real name and location so people can find you.
     • Add a brief bio – limited to 160 characters – shows on your profile page.
     • Only protect your tweets if you want to keep your tweets private i.e. approve who can follow you (this also keeps your tweets out of search results). I don’t personally see the point of this if you are using Twitter to share with your educational colleagues.
   • Password Tab: self explanatory, but you need this password not only to login and tweet, but also to use Twitter clients and APIs.
   • Devices Tab: If you want to you can tweet via your mobile, and have direct tweets (tweets sent to your privately) texted to your phone.
   • Notices Tab: Get told when you receive a new follower, have a direct tweet, or sign up for the newsletter. Probably worth turning these on at least to begin with.
   • Picture Tab: Add an image of yourself – people are more likely to follow you if you have an image.
   • Design Tab: Show your interest in Twitter and change from the standard design. There are lots of Twitter background creation apps around, but to start with use one of those available on Twitter.
3. Find people to follow
   
   
   You can search for any phrase, not just names. Click on [Follow] when you find someone you want to follow i.e. get their tweets. This is the point of Twitter, listen to other people’s tweets and share your tweets with other people.
   • There is a great list of edu-tweeters compiled by Jane Hart at the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies (C4LPT). Why not add yourself?
   • You can search Twazzup.com in a similar way to [Find People] on Twitter. In addition to real-time tweets on your topic it also shows related keywords, suggested people to follow, news, most popular links, and influential/active/latest tweeters.
   • Common Craft explain Twitter Search:
     
4. Trending Topics (what’s hot) show on your Twitter home page (you need to be logged in). Note the hash tag in some of these.
   
5. Tweet: Once you have followed a few people and seen what they tweet about, it’s time to tweet yourself. The simplest way is to go to twitter, login and tweet in the [What are you doing?] box. As you will have seen you don’t have to literally tweet what you are doing. The question “What’s getting your attention?” is probably more useful.
6. Get a Twitter application or two. Having to go to Twitter each time can be a pain. So you will probably want to get your self a Twitter client. These help you to organise, read and tweet. Try out a few to see which you like best. These are my personal favourites.
   • Tweetdeck – connects you to Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and more.
   • Seesmic – recently added the ability to connect to Facebook as well as multiple twitter accounts.
   • Echofon – used to be called TwitterFox, great way to connect with Twitter if you use the Firefox browser.

Why is its useful for learning and teaching?

I blogged about 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Education back in Aug 2008. So I won’t repeat myself entirely. But here are a few ideas about why I feel it’s useful for learning and teaching:

1. Keep yourself up-to-date with what other edu-tweeters are reading/thinking/doing. You can’t possibly read everything these days, so let others do some of the leg work, and reciprocate by tweeting about what you’ve read/seen. Feel free to ask questions too.
2. Keep parents in the know about what’s happening in your class/school. Have a school Twitter account with many people who tweet (helpful when someone is on leave)
3. Keep prospective students in the know about what’s happening in your institution/college/university
4. Keep your students in the know about things you’ve seen on the web that are useful for their course
5. Put a feed from your tweet/search into your LMS class site. Use # tags so you can tweet for numerous classes.
6. Promote your students’ stories (but be careful to maintain anonymity)

When and where do you tweet?

1. Many people tweet all the time, from work, from home, from their mobile whilst on the go (pls don’t do this whilst driving!). So where you do it is entirely up to you and the capabilities you have for doing it.
2. When you have something to say. Do the “I’m going shopping” tweet if you like, but if you want to be an edu-tweeter my advice is to mainly, well, edu-tweet.
3. It’s becoming more and more used at conferences as a “back channel” so people tweet about their impressions, thought about speakers, people they’ve met. Conferences often have a hash tag #hashtag which is included in the tweet so other people can follow all the tweets from the conference by searching for the hastag.

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