Getting Started with TWITTER! (https://twitter.com/)
Contributed by Aaron Meuller
Twitter is an essential part of becoming a connected educator, a system that allows you to share your thoughts and ideas with educators from around your school, district, province, country and planet! Through a simple interface, so much can be shared with an incredibly large community. Twitter allows you to connect with educators around shared interests, topics, conferences, grade levels, subjects and professional development opportunities. It can seem a little daunting at first, but like all new learning opportunities, sometimes you need to just jump down the rabbit hole and start checking it out! In this course, we will use twitter to connect and share with each other, as it allows us all to “see” each other online, and be able to converse, reply, and distribute new learning on our blogs easily and simply. Twitter allows us to tweet out our “links” to our blog posts and to share links of very useful websites and resources with the rest of the class. We will be diving into twitter very early in the class, as it is one of the most useful bits of “infrastructure” for us to develop as a professional learning community.
When signing up for a twitter account, I recommend using your full name, as this will be a “professional” account that you may want to continue with after this course is over. (Twitter introduction – http://vlns.vsb.bc.ca/amueller/twitterprez.swf) (this is a flash presentation and will not work on an iPad) However, you do not have to use your full name, nor do you have to put any personal information here, if you are not comfortable with that. I do not recommend ‘locking down’ your account, as it effectively makes you invisible on twitter to anyone you have not pre-approved. This greatly hampers your ability to share and connect with the other members of this class, your school, your district, and your province.
There are many helpful guides on using twitter all over the internet. There are youtube videos, websites, and other online resources that can help you get started with twitter easily. Don’t feel you have to master it right away as we will be developing our twitter skills and knowledge as we work through the course.
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