Using Twitter for Professional Learning

Many people use Twitter to mindlessly share their personal ideas with the world. Twitter limits user to 140 characters per tweet, however this can be just enough to get an idea across. School, students, teacher, journalists, leaders all across the world use Twitter as platform to share information. The information shared by these users can be found by following them or searching for certain hashtags. Searching hashtags can the be the equivalent of a Google search. This allows users to easily search for ideas and topics related to educational topics.

5 Reasons to use Twitter for Professional Learning

1. Tweeting out school information- From homework assignments to field trips to special school events, twitter can keep parents connected to their child’s school new and information.
2. Gathering educational resources- Sometimes teachers are looking for new and interactive ways to teach a topic. Twitter can be a resources for finding those new ways. With a simple search, you can be flooded with a hundred different examples and ideas.
3. Follow People/Groups- Users can follow people or companies relevant to their subjects. For example, I can follow popular authors and find out when they are releasing their newest books, or find activities relating to certain books. I also can follow Journals who review books, so I can develop my collection.
4. Connect with the Community- Educational user can tweet out public school events or projects that students created, to try to gain interest and support from the community. This would be a way of connecting education to the outside world in your community.
5. Connect Classroom- Teachers can connect their classroom and students to someone across the globe. This would create a collaboration between teachers and students that they would have otherwise missed out on. This would emerge not only students but teachers in different cultures and customs.

5 Struggles with using Twitter for Professional Learning

1. Privacy Concerns- Protecting your personal privacy can be a major concern for educators. Students, parents, administrators and many others could find their twitter handle and follow or message them can be a concern. That is why when creating an account it would be smart to have a separate educational one and a personal one, if you were going to use for more than educational purposes. You can also set your privacy settings to private, so you have the power to deny requests to follow you.
2. Too much information- This is a concern for many people on any social media platform. There is so much information out in the online world, that it can become distracting to many. One way to limit the information is to use the hashtag search, so you are only getting relevant to what you want to find.
3. 140 Characters- Being limited to 140 characters can be very challenging to some educators. It is in many educators natures to fully explain our ideas, which does not necessarily work on Twitter. However, users could share multiple tweets or add a link to the information.
4. Protecting Students Privacy- There may be some struggle in know what is and is not appropriate to share with student pictures or created work. Personally, every year I get a list of students who are and are not allowed to have their picture taken or any of their information shared. If this is not something that your school does, then you could always develop a permission slip for parents to fill out. This would allow parents to know exactly how you are going to use Twitter in the classroom and with their students.
5. Twitter streams are constantly updating- This can be challenging for your users to follow, if you are posting tweet after tweet since it updating frequently. This does not allow for back and forth dialogue to be created between users or for the content to be easily saved.