This is the long version of a handout that I created in Fall 2010 for a how-to workshop. What we actually used was much shorter and stuck to the basics. This can be adjusted to fit our learning team, if it would be useful.

Twitter for Teachers

Twitter is a form of social media that allows users to share short, 140-character messages. People who use Twitter have access to a wealth of information that is being shared every day from news organizations, political and social leaders, and professionals in just about every field.

More and more educators are using Twitter to share information, express pedagogical ideas, carry on discussions, search for content, etc. While the sheer volume of "tweets" may seem overwhelming, there are several tools and strategies that can make it a very manageable resource. In this workshop you will learn how to:

• Post a tweet
• Follow (subscribe to) other people's feeds
• Use hashtags to search & organize tweets
• Reply to / Retweet another user’s message
• Participate in a live Twitter-based discussion
• Think creatively about teaching in the medium

Getting Started
If you do not already have a Twitter account you will need to create one. If you already have an account, simply sign in.

1. Go to http://twitter.com and click the Sign Up box.
2. Fill out the short form and unselect the checked boxes if you prefer. It may take a few tries to come up with an original username. If you pick one today and hate it later, you can always change it in your Settings.
3. Click Create my Account.
4. The URL for your public Twitter stream is http://twitter.com/yourusername.
5. After the workshop, be sure to go into Settings and add a photo and a short bio for yourself. This information (along with the content of your tweets) will help other users decide whether they want to follow you.

Posting a Tweet

1. Start on your Home page. Once you are logged in this will just be twitter.com OR you can click the Home link from the top menu.
2. Click inside the “What’s Happening?” text box.
3. Type a message! As you type, the number of available characters will continue to drop from 140. If you go into negative digits you will have to do some editing until you bring the count back up to 0 before you can successfully post.
4. Hit the “Tweet” button to post your message to your stream.
5. Tips:
1. To direct a tweet to a particular user, type @ followed by their username. (This does not work the same as email or Facebook messaging but more like calling out that person’s name at a party, or using parenthetical citation in a research paper. See the Advanced Twitter section below to learn how to receive notifications when someone tweets a message to you.)
2. Retweet: Twitter’s instant “retweet this” button doesn’t let you add new text; to do this copy & paste with RT @name instead
3. URL shorteners like bit.ly and goo.gl make it easier to post links and comment on them at the same time. Copy the original URL into the box on the shortener’s site and it will produce a new, much shorter URL. Then copy and paste this into your tweet. (warning: copy & paste the ENTIRE shortened URL or else make the mistake of Meg Whitman’s campaign spokesperson! http://gizmo.do/amJuh9)
4. Deleting a tweet: hover your cursor over the message and a Delete button will appear.

Searches & Hashtags
The Search bar appears on the right side of your Home page. You can use this to search for any topic or person.

Hashtags: if you type “#” in front of a word or phrase (without spaces), it will automatically appear in a stream of tweets worldwide that include that phrase. This is called a hashtag. Adding a hashtag for a topic related to your tweet makes it easier for people to find the message when they search for tweets in that topic. Hashtags can also be used for real-time discussion during conferences and workshops.

1. Use Twitter Search to find #howtotuesday.
2. This should bring up all tweets that are posted with that hashtag.
3. Post a message to the stream, making sure to include #howtotuesday in your tweet.
4. We will use this stream as a “wading pool” for our workshop: practice the Reply and Retweet options, take notes that you want to access later, post any thoughts & reflections you wish to share with other participants.

Finding People to Follow

1. Click on Find People at the top of the page. You can search by name or username. A few suggestions:
1. @citesATS -- the CITES ATS feed
2. @EdTechForum -- Educational Technology at UIUC
3. @amckinn -- Anne McKinney
4. @alweiss77 -- Al Weiss
2. You can also go directly to the websites for your favorite organizations or blogs and look for invitations to their Twitter feeds.
3. To follow someone: click the Follow button on their page.
4. Tips:
1. Collecting followers: follow others in the workshop, or search w/in Twitter for @name, or look to your favorite blog/website/network/etc. to see if they have a twitter feed.
2. If you plant to use Twitter for professional networking it’s a good idea to allow Twitter to email you when someone starts following you. Go to Settings --> Notices and check this box.
3. Check someone’s feed, bio, ratio of followers to following when determining whether you want to follow someone. You are under no obligation to follow everyone who follows you.
4. You can organize the people you follow into different lists: edtech, for example, vs. family or crazy celebrities. If you make these lists public then everyone will be able to see the people you have listed. You can also follow someone else’s public list, though that will not automatically appear in your feed (the list will be clickable on the side instead).

Food for Thought: When & Why Twitter?

Non-Teaching Professional

• sharing information, links with colleagues
• asking questions, receiving answers on any topic
• synchronous discussion during conferences
• maintaining a professional online presence for current or future job searches

Teaching Possibilities

• synchronous discussion for classroom or online students
• sending announcements to students (this requires students to RSS your feed or follow w/mobile notifications
• creative/writing exercise: can students express their ideas succinctly and clearly in 140 characters?
• teaching students to develop professional online presence (something potential employers can look to for more information during job search)
• Mark Sample’s Twitter Adoption Matrix

Twitter literacy: a few shorthand phrases

• RE @name: Reply to another user’s tweet
• RT @name: Retweeting is similar to email forwarding. When you retweet someone else’s message it means that you tweet the exact same message (with RT and their user name included in your tweet).
• #: In Twitter this symbol is called a hashtag. Adding a hashtag to your tweet will help it show up in searches. Searches can pull up tweets without hashtags, but if you want your message to show up in a stream of tweets on a topic you need a hashtag (conference discussion, notes)
• FF (sometimes spelled out as Follow Friday): On Fridays, some Twitter users will tweet a message with a list of other users’ names. This is a recommendation to the tweeter’s followers that they might be interested in following the people listed.

Practical considerations for use in education & professional networking

• How do you want to follow students / get students to follow a class feed? Possibilities:
• list
• hashtag
• RSS
• There’s too much! How can I possibly follow everything?
• Be selective in whom you choose to follow;
• use search options or desktop applications;
• don’t stress about missing something
• Frequency of posting: depends on how you want to use it
• sporadic info sharing
• active discussion use
• What makes a good tweet? Substance! (David Silver’s think vs. thin tweet argument)
• Archive posts by topic with Archivist or Twapper Keeper; create a chart showing which students tweet the most.
• Archivist http://archivist.visitmix.com/ creates interesting charts, works best w/tweets over the past week.
• Twapper Keeper http://twapperkeeper.com/index.php stores tweets online.
• Assessing students’ tweets: Participation points
• Word clouds: visual way to see common threads from posts with something like Wordle http://www.wordle.net/

Advanced Twitter

• DeClutter bookmarklet http://www.conroyp.com/2010/03/11/declutter/ weeds out the tweets you don’t want to read based on keywords.
• Siftlinkshttp://www.siftlinks.com/ monitors your Twitter feed and creates an RSS feed for links that people tweet.
• This would be useful if you want to get information from Twitter but prefer the RSS interface.
• If you have a very high-traffic feed Twitter stream with lots of links then Siftlinks may not be able to process all of them.
• Twitterfeedhttp://twitterfeed.com/ will automatically feed your blog posts to Twitter, Facebook, other social networks
• Twitter Searchhttp://search.twitter.com/ helps you set up an RSS feed of tweets that mention you: enter your Twitter account name (@name).
• Alternately, set up an RSS feed for any hashtag or search term.
• Once you enter a search on this page, it will not only show you the relevant posts but offer to send the feed to your RSS.
• You can also manage the way you follow people and get notifications when someone tweets about you by using a desktop Twitter platform. Software like Tweetdeck http://www.tweetdeck.com/ is free and makes it easier to sift through your feed for the content you want.
• DEXTR http://dextr.riglondon.com/ displays 10-foot Twitter posts for big-screen presentation.