Using Twitter

One of my goals this summer is to increase my professional development by using the internet in a more savvy way; this includes taking online courses via Coursera, augmenting and organizing websites that have or will prove to be useful for my teaching, and joining Twitter since I had heard how useful it is a place to engage with other educators. After just a few hours as a member, what an enhancement this last step has already proven to be! Wow!

The first person I followed was my math teacher friend, who is a genius at using the internet for his personal learning network (PLN), and he promptly sent out one tweet that explained I had joined Twitter and was looking for some history tweeps. Literally within minutes other people had tweeted suggestions for people to follow and hashtags to look at, and from there I was on to exploring a blog from a new social studies teacher (which I quickly added here to my own blog roll) and I explored a link to an article in The Atlantic with images from America in 1963. This means I had colleagues and primary sources at my fingertips within minutes of joining Twitter. Needless to say I'm still figuring out the site...I've been using the Twitter glossary page to figure out how to use "Lists", "Favorites", and "Hashtags" efficiently, and I found another site that helped me embed my Tweets to this blog, so for someone who may need some help with this wonderful resource, here are some very small tips:

1. Retweets rule! I love the idea that people can so easily share information and web sites simply by retweeting, or copying a tweet for their own audience. With a mission of simply sharing information, I'm so surprised I haven't joined Twitter sooner.

2. Find helpful hashtags! #sschat was the first helpful hashtag I found for collecting websites and finding people to follow. I also liked #sstlap and #tlap, both of which are related to the book Teach like a Pirate, which I haven't read yet, but which is on my Goodreads list of books to read. These hashtags helped me find educators from different subject areas who were getting together to discuss pedagogy as a whole. I discovered that there are rich forums for social studies teachers to get together and discuss topics put forth by moderators in the subject area, so hopefully I'll join in the next 'conference' in about two weeks!

Any other helpful tips would be wonderful!