It took me awhile to become a Twitter user. I had heard a lot about Twitter, but I was never sure why I would use it. Then, about two years ago during a meeting with several techies, Twitter was mentioned several times. I finally turned to someone near me and asked, “Why would I ever want to use Twitter?” She answered, “It’s a great resource for personal professional development.” That answer was good enough for me to decide to check into it.
I signed up for a Twitter account and started following a few of the people who were at that meeting. They tweeted many useful resources and ideas on a variety of educational subjects. I began to see the power of Twitter as a personal professional development tool. I began to follow other educators, and my personal professional development community began to widen.
After about a year, I discovered Tweetdeck and hashtags. Tweetdeck is an application that not only displays tweets from the people I follow, but also shows me updates from my LinkedIn account, Facebook page and any hashtags I want to follow. I can also tweet from Tweetdeck and have those tweets also go to my Facebook page.
I still feel like a novice. Other people have written excellent articles about Twitter and teachers, so I will refer you to their writings. To learn more about using Twitter as an educator, visit Justin Tarte’s blog at http://justintarte.blogspot.com/2011/01/10-steps-for-educators-new-to-twitter.html . To learn more about hashtags, visit Chris Messina’s blog at http://twitter.pbworks.com/w/page/1779812/Hashtags . You can follow me at http://twitter.com/mpruter.
