Twitter has a had a large impact on my social network and personal professional development. It can be used as a social tool to keep up to date with friends, share concerns and enjoy banter or it can be an educational tool for the establishment of a social network that shares resources, urls and ideas. (my personal use of the network). My twitter friends come from Australia, NZ, USA, Israel, Singapore, England, Bangkok etc
In this post I will outline how to use twitter in its basic format. There is much more but that can wait for another time.
Register with twitter and activate the resultant email. (Some people have several twitter names.)
Search for people who you know are in twitter and click follow. Add as many as you can and return to the home screen. Tweets by people you are following should show up on the screen.
Key in what you are doing at the moment and press update. Just keep on tweeting until someone replies or simply watch everyone else’s tweets.
Click on an avatar, go to next window and a direct message link will show up on the RHS side bar. Key in a direct message to that person and it is then kept private from the general tweeters and goes directly to their email account.
To add more interesting people, click on one avatar and look at who they follow. Choose some of these people to follow. Some of the experienced users will take a very caring and sharing approach if they know you are a newbie. Many will suggest some good people to follow. If you join in, people will want to follow you.
A person can be removed or blocked from your list if the need arises. Click on their avatar and look for the links.
140 characters is the limit to a tweet.
Uses in education
Powerful social networking tool. I started with 3 people I followed and one week later have 89 and 58 following me. Some of the most popular tweeters state that 150 is a good number and may not wish to follow more. However, unless they are selective, you can still follow their comments and learn.
A blog in a minute.
Quick communication and feedback tool.
Follow sites like edtechtalk and be informed when their live shows are on. (Highly recommended.)
Possibility for classroom uses.
There is so much more to twitter but give it a try. However, careful, it can be very addictive.
2 responses so far ↓
1
Sue Waters
// Jan 17, 2008 at 11:52 am
Well I started out with good intentions of limiting my numbers — but I find it hard to not follow. So now following 246 people. I also use tweetscan so if someone I”m not following responds I still get the response and can choose to answer back.
At present I see the value of twitter for my own personal learning. Not totally convinced re-use with my students because to be honest it totally freaks them out. They social network totally differently from us – mainly networking with people they have known f2f.
2
Penny Coutas
// Jan 20, 2008 at 4:00 am
I’ve used Twitter… well… TwitterVision with quite a few classes in an activity on “Why learn a foreign language?”
I had them tally the number of English and Non-English tweets at http://twittervision.com/ as a class. Due to timezones, the US were usually asleep when I did it, so it was quite surprising to some how many tweets were in a language other than English… and brought home the fact that us Aussies are weird being uni-lingual for the most part! We then did follow-up activities and wrote our own tweets in the target language.
Of course, there’s always the danger of inappropriate content popping up, but it hasn’t happened to me yet, and I’ve run that lesson a number of times now
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