Thing 6: Twitter

Willie Nelson does it. Ellen does it. Your favorite NPR hosts do it, too! And now it's your turn. No longer is Twitter mainly used to let the world know what you had for breakfast: surgeons use it to instruct medical students and educate the public, politicians use it to update their constituents, the Red Cross uses it share emergency information and educational leaders use it to share new ideas and engage in dialogues with interested "followers."

Thing 6: Twitter (Week of July 5-9 if you're working by week!)

Read the article "Twittering, Not Frittering, Professional Development in 140 Characters" from Edutopia OR 10 High Fliers on Twitter from The Chronicle of Higher Education, and then create a Twitter account for yourself. If you're comfortable with this, set your account as "Public" (that way we can all find you on Twitter). If not, then you have to approve individual people to be your followers. Do a few Internet searches to find leaders in your area, and chances are that they will have a Twitter account (for example, I might search for leaders in the world of educational technology). "Follow" at least three of them, post your Twitter name to your blog (mine is lisawiestro), and then let us know who you're following.

In addition to following each of you, when you've got your Twitter accounts going, here is an example of some of the people I'm following:

• David Warlick (a well known leader in ed tech)
• Bryan Alexander (another ed tech guru, works for NITLE)
• OnPointRadio (one of my fav NPR shows - people tweet questions, host Tom Ashbrook frequently reads comments and questions from real time tweeters)
• Chronicle of Higher Education (tweets links to the major stories)
• IADeptofEd
  
• CoeBRAI (follows Coe's RAGBRAI group with daily updates from the road)
• usedgov (US Department of Education)

Discovery Exercise

1. Create a Twitter account
2. Find at least 3 people to follow
3. Retweet a post or two from someone you're following
4. Post your Twitter name to your blog
5. Tell us who you're following
6. Reflect on your experience using/reading about Twitter. Do you think you would use Twitter? How could it be applied to an educational setting?