Teacher to Teacher

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.