A Teacher’s Introduction to Twitter

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social network for the sending and receiving of short 140 character updates between yourself and your followers

Twitter has around 200 million users and 140 million tweets per day covering everything from haircuts to the war in #libya

Many services exist alongside Twitter from tweeting about news stories to seeing tweets geotagged on a map – the use is up to you

Twitter has a number of features you need to get your head round in order to become a successful tweeter

To write a tweet on your main screen you type a tweet in the box which counts down number of characters available

This tweet will appear in your own profile and in the streams of other people who follow you

To follow a user you click on their follow button – they don’t have to follow you – their tweets appear in your main stream

Twitter has a number of user suggestion features – try them as they may give you some interesting people

To send a message to a user you write their user name with an @ in front of it eg @sharland this is a public message

You can send private DM messages but that person has to be following you first

Hashtags are words with a # infront of them – these become searchable across Twitter

Hashtags can be used to follow virtually any topic eg #libya #war #maths or you can create your own tag eg #ryegeography

If you see a tweet in your main stream you like you can Retweet it so that it appears in your own followers tweet streams

Retweeting is a useful way to broadcast interesting or useful tweets to your followers who may not follow the original tweeter

Tweets can be saved as favourites which can be managed further with bookmarking services like Delicious.com

So why use Twitter?

For teachers Twitter is about being able to connect and share information and resources with peers from around the world

Twitter can also be used to inspire classroom discussion surrounding ongoing and immediate events in the world

From having conversations about issues to exchanging ideas and resources think of it as a living resource bank

Think of Twitter as not only a new form of

communication but a new form of networking that

will help pupils understand their world

Ultimately the use is up to you

All slides written within 140 characters

find me on twitter @sharland

and thank you to all who helped