28 Creative Ideas for Teaching with Twitter. Twitter - my virtual staffroom. I don't go into my "real" staffroom very often at school. My mailbox is there so I check it a couple of times a week. Sometimes I go into the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee or tea. I don't eat my lunch there - I eat with the students in the dining room and then I'm off outside for a playground duty or I attend a meeting.
However there is another "staffroom" that I go into every day where I meet another group of teachers whom I also think of as my colleagues. This staffroom is Twitter. I go into this virtual staffroom every morning as I'm eating my breakfast. While I'm at school I don't often have the chance to spend time in my virtual staffroom. When I get home I check through my Twitter stream again. I often think I'd like to meet these people in a real staffroom. Photo Credit: Tiny birds in my hand by Lise. 20 Twitter Hashtags Every Teacher Should Know About. Twitter chats are such a great way to stay connected and informed in your professional circle , and education is no exception.
Through education chats, you can find out about new methods for teaching, tech resources, even jobs for teachers. Most chats are held weekly, and offer an opportunity to have a regularly scheduled conversation with like-minded educators. Check out our collection to find a wealth of Twitter chats that are great for all kinds of educators. General These Twitter chats cover anything and everything in education, and represent a great jumping off point for those just getting started in Twitter education chats.
#edchat – Talk to a variety of educators around the world through #edchat, Tuesdays at noon and 7 p.m. Administration and Behavior Check out these Twitter chats to get connected and discuss topics concerning school administrators. #AcAdv – Tuesdays from 8-9 p.m. Subject Chats. Over 100 ideas for using Twitter in the Classroom. This handful of resources provide about 100 different ideas for, and examples of, using Twitter in the classroom. It’s been almost 8 months since I published the post, “6 Examples of Using Twitter in the Classroom”, about uses of the popular micro-blogging tool in the instructional setting.
This post generated a lot of traffic, and continues to attract hundreds of viewers every week. Since that brief posting, I’ve come across a lot of articles containing examples and suggestions for using Twitter in instructional applications. I’ve combed through many of these and tried to boil down the redundancies to create a rich set of idea-laden resources. While there’s still going to be some overlap in the concepts presented in these articles, they clearly meet the goal of providing a thorough set of ideas and examples for leveraging Twitter in the educational process.
(I follow this new listing with the original set of articles cited in my June ’09 post). About Kelly Walsh Print This Post. Why Twitter? What's Happening? My twitter story began on the 21st of February 2009. I didn't know too much about the 'website' just that you had 140 characters to say what you wished. However, little did I know, this 'website' wasn't really like most websites, once you're apart of it you're apart of a society.
The whole 140 characters came as a struggle to 15 year old me, how was I supposed to tweet Orlando Bloom saying how much I loved him in ONLY 140 characters? So yes, like a lot of others I joined twitter to stalk. To stalk all my favourite celebs, this soon got boring, there are only so many 'I've just eaten a banana' or 'in the studio' tweets you can be interested in. Based on it's continuing popularity I felt that there must have been another purpose to twitter, it couldn't be for me to really spread my views - I only had about 7 followers (50% Spam accounts...). So why tweet? - it's simple - short bursts of thoughts/feelings/events - informal - you can reach all types of audiences. Twitter for Educators.pdf. Twitter for Teachers – a professional development tool | learningblog.org. It's All About The Hashtag. If you remember, in my 3 part series on Twitter, I wrote about how I completely changed the way I do professional development on Twitter.
In a nutshell, I no longer start with signing up and tweeting the first day. I always show how to use Twitter without ever signing up. I believe it's important to establish the value in using it rather than using it and attempting to find the value. What a lot of people don't realize that Twitter is a very powerful search engine.
Just like Google, if you know how to use the search effectively you can find pretty much anything. And one of those effective ways is leveraging the power of hashtags. What is a hashtag you ask? From The Twitter Fan Wiki: Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. Basically, its a tag in your post so that you or someone else can find it later or track it as it is happening. Right, but how does this help you find stuff for your classroom? 4 Great Twitter Applications for Teachers Using Twitter In The Classroom. These tools offer free functionality that extend and enhance the possibilities for instructional uses of Twitter.
Twitter is playing a role in more classrooms every day. Articles like “6 Examples of Using Twitter in the Classroom” and “100 Ways To Teach With Twitter” have drawn tens of thousands of readers, a clear testament to the high level of academic interest in this wildly popular microblogging platform. Teachers are finding new ways to use Twitter to engage their students, build stronger academic and professional relationships, and to share information in a richer learning environment, and they are using tools like these to bring more fun and functionality to the process. It’s easy to get started with these applications. Users can sign up using their Twitter accounts (although GroupTweet does get a little more involved).
Twtpoll (twtpoll.com)Polling and survey tools provide teachers so many capabilities. About Kelly Walsh Print This Post. The Ultimate Guide To Using Twitter In Education. Twitter seems to be here to stay. As one of the most popular ways for teachers, students, and the general public to communicate, it’s becoming a must-have tool in almost every teacher’s toolbox. However, numerous recent studies have shown that education in general has been slow to adopt social media. In an effort to speed up this adoption process, below you’ll find a boatload of resources on the past, present, and future of Twitter in education as well as some helpful guides to using the tool in the classroom. This guide is by no means exhaustive and is meant to be added to on a regular basis. To do that, Edudemic needs your help . The History of Communication The following is a guest post excerpt from Ernesto Priego of The Guardian (UK).
With that in mind, the future of communication in the form of social media is examined as a way to forever alter the world of education. Read the full article on Guardian.co.uk here . The Nuts and Bolts of Twitter In Education The Twitter Experiment Dr. All About Twitter Hashtags. After writing my Teacher Challenge guest post on using Twitter to build your PLN, I was asked by a number of people about hashtags. I know when I first started using Twitter, it took me a little while to get my head around what the # symbol meant. This is a handy feature of Twitter that is worth learning about. What is a hashtag? The # symbol + a word/acronym in a tweet is called a hashtag. Why use hashtags? There are so many tweets flying around at any one time that they can get lost in the crowd.
If you click on a hashtagged word in any tweet, you can find a list of other tweets with that hashtag. Hashtags can help you connect with people who have similar interests. If you use a desktop application like TweetDeck, you can add a column with all the tweets on #daily5 so you don’t miss anything. In TweetDeck just click on the + sign at the top of your screen and then put #daily5 (or your favourite hashtag) into the search box. Hashtag etiquette Where do you put hashtags? Who makes up hashtags? Twitter Series-A New Kind Of Twitter PD. This week I am going to do a series of posts on Twitter. I get asked a lot of questions about it so I though, why not write about it and put all the details in one place. You can read Part 2 here and Part 3 here.
Today I am starting with Twitter Professional Development. As many times as I have talked to folks, done workshops for and even preached about Twitter, there are some that just won't (for whatever reason) jump in. Huh? Yep. Take a step back and think about PD done about Twitter. After the example comes the registration process. Then comes the terminology. And there is still so much more to cover... Now comes the first Tweet. When someone leaves this session one of twothings will happen. They will be super excited about it all.
Then there are the others. I used to teach PD like that. So I had to do something different.. I developed a new method of teaching folks about Twitter where I don't actually teach them how to use Twitter. I always break my Twitter PD into several sessions. Twitter Series-What I Wish I Knew Before I Started Twitter. This is the second in a series I am doing all about Twitter. You can read the first post here, where I discuss the need to change the way we teach about Twitter. Today, lets go back to the beginning and look at what we wish we had known... If you have read any of my leadership pieces before, you know I am big on reflection. As educators, looking back on our practice is one of the most important things we can do. I try to set aside time each day to just think about how I did a workshop or something I said or a resource I looked at. I think reflecting is pretty easy.
So is the case with learning about something. Keeping that in mind, I sent out a tweet: Doing some writing for an upcoming piece. I also posted it on Google Plus and asked a few of my folks in my office the same question. Before Twitter-"I wish I knew how to make it meaningful to me. " Before Twitter-"I wish I had known how to find people and build my PLN. " Before Twitter-"I wish I had known I could talk to people. " The A-Z Dictionary of Educational Twitter Hashtags. Whether you’re a new or seasoned Twitter user, you likely come across confusing hashtags that probably look like a bunch of nonsense. First, What’s A Hashtag? The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keyword or topic in a Tweet. Any Twitter user can categorize or follow topics with hashtags.Those hashtags (usually) mean something and are a great way to get a tweet to appear in search results or discussion monitoring.
For example, the popular #edchat hashtag is used by thousands of users every Tuesday. It makes it easy (sort of) for people to monitor what’s happening in the conversation rather than having to try and guess what topics you should search for. How To Hide Your Hashtag Chat From Followers When having a Twitter #hashtag chat, if you want to avoid overwhelming your followers, start any tweet you want to “hide” with @HideChat or (one character shorter) @HideTag . You don’t need to do this with all your chat tweets (though you could). Sources The Most Popular Hashtags.