Twitter is an excellent tool for both students and teachers. For students, it is an excellent form of research and connecting to ideas and thinkers from around the world. For educators, it is a fantastic tool for building a professional learning network. While twitter can be challenging to navigate as there are so many people to follow and so much “noise,” there is an incredible community of teachers who are sharing ideas on the platform. Following or creating a list of educators can help teachers in developing lessons or units. It is a great place for feedback as well from other teachers.
Follwoing #edchat is an excellent way to join a discussion about important classroom topics. Edchats are scheduled discussions on twitter where people post about common topics. For example, every Sunday at 7:00pm PST there is a discussion about BC Education that uses the hashtag #bcedchat. If you want to join this discussion you can simply go on twitter at that time and type in #bcedchat in the search bar and you will see the running conversation of BC educators. To open a dialogue, you either create a new post and type #bcedchat at the end OR reply to a fellow teacher.