Short version:

Start A Twitter Account, fill out your profile and start following people you have come across in through #15MINPLN 4

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Image: Some rights reserved by Rosaura Ochoa

Long Version:

Twitter is often described as micro-blogging. Users can post updates relevant to their life (professional or otherwise) that may potentially be read by anyone who happens to come across them via this online tool. Posting a tweet is perhaps a natural evolution of texting (sms) technology on mobile phones through which users communicate their message in a limited number of characters – on twitter, you have 140 available characters for each tweet (update). Users are able to follow other users, and so receive a continuous feed of updates from all those whom they are following – hence the social networking aspect of this tool. They can easily retweet (re-publish) other people’s tweets, direct specific tweets to particular twitter users, and tag (or categorise) tweets through a clever feature that converts any word following a # symbol to a tag (as in my tag for this series – #15MINPLN). 

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Image: Some rights reserved by simonwheatley

By now most people have heard of twitter thanks to its growing prominence in recent media coverage of major national and international events over the last two years such as elections, political conflicts and natural disasters. These should hopefully be revealing some its huge potential in connecting folk across the world with historically unparalleled immediacy. Despite this there is still quite a common, negative reaction to the idea of twitter (I held this view until not so very long ago) … what is the point of it? Isn’t an overrated, futile vanity project for those who want the largely irrelevant minutiae of their lives public for all to see? 

If you still subscribe to a similar view, I urge you to think again. Twitter is now potentially the single most powerful way of connecting with likeminded educators across the globe.  And if using an rss feed reader is ‘priming the pump’, using twitter demands a far greater and faster metaphor. Something akin to the pipe in the BT broadband TV advert which I referenced in #15MINPLN No. 1.

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Image: Some rights reserved by fireramsey

There are many great resources available to introduce you to Twitter and how it can best be used by you. To get started, just as I did in the first post in this series, I leave you just a few introductory resources. I end the post with a link to twitter – once you have read/watched these resources, this step in developing your personal learning network simply asks you to create a twitter account and start filling out your profile (again, bearing in mind your answers to #15MINPLN No. 2). The next post after this one will encourage you to develop your usage of twitter even further as it is should be one of your main ways of connecting with others similarly interested in better education.

Twitter basics for absolute beginners from Jason Renshaw on Vimeo.

(Above video features here : English Raven – Some Twitter basics for teachers who are absolute beginners)

And to help me persuade you that twitter is useful for educators:

Eight Reasons An Innovative Educator Uses Twitter

Action: Create an account on twitter and start filling out your details. Then, to get the ball rolling, start following people you have referred to in #15MINPLN 4.

Twitter

Next in the #15MINPLN series: No. 9 – Use Twitter to Connect with People Like You