Do you live in Twitterville? Twitter can be used as a powerful professional learning network for teachers and administrators! Best of all, Twitter is an extremely popular (and free) resource among the online community. Basically, Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service utilizing instant messaging (commonly referred to as tweets). Tweets are updates to a users Twitter profile page and are limited to 140 characters of text. Subscribers to the profile page (also known as followers) can select to receive tweets via the Twitter website, text message, or through other external applications. Twitter has a fantastic search field where you can search all public tweets via topic thread. Looking for information on Autism? Type in Autism into the search field and you’ll find all the latest tweets. From there, you might find a specific individual to follow that shares a common interest in your topic of selection. It’s a fantastic way to share resources and receive professional development in a quick and easy manner! Give it a try!
Want to learn more about Twitter?
http://www.commoncraft.com/twitter (basic overview)
http://www.commoncraft.com/twitter-search (overview of searching within Twitter)
http://www.davidrisley.com/reports/twittermanual.pdf (Twitter Manual)
http://www.twibes.com/category/education (education based Twitter groups…A.K.A…Twibes)
http://www.utdallas.edu/~mrankin/usweb/twitterconclusions.htm (Twitter experiment in higher education)
http://www.bachelorsdegreeonline.com/blog/2009/twitteredu-100-excellent-educational-twitter-feeds/ (100 excellent educational Twitter feeds)
http://lamp.tu-graz.ac.at/~i203/ebner/publication/09_edumedia.pdf (how people are using Twitter during conferences)
