Sunday, March 6, 2011
Get the most out of Twitter
I'm teaching a new online course, aimed at helping teachers integrate Twitter, Glogster and other social media into the K-12 classroom. We begin with Twitter, because most teachers know nothing about it and it's a wonderful way to communicate with students and other teachers.
We're beginning with the absolute basics -- registering for an account, sending messages to specific users and streaming chats with hashtags. I also want my course participants to value Twitter as a powerful professional development tool, so I've provided them with a short list of educators, whom I consider to be Twitter power users.
Today, while I was trolling my own lengthy list of users that I follow, I realized that there's a lot of dead weight there. This revelation not only got me to cleaning out my list, but it made me think about getting my course participants to seriously consider just what makes someone important enough to follow.
Only follow the best
Here are a few things I look for when deciding if I'm going to follow someone or not:
Does the person have a picture? I like to see you.
Does the person have plenty of recent tweets? You don't have to have thousands of tweets, but if you haven't offered anything in a month, you aren't active enough.
Is the person an educator? I don't want businesses or people unrelated to education cluttering up my Twitter stream.
Are you tweeting about education? I've dumped all kinds of people lately, who clutter up my stream with declarations about their favorite basketball team, what their two-year-old did or how their electricity failed. If it's not about education, or EdTech, I'm generally not interested. A few unrelated tweets occasionally for your friends is fine, but these should be rare.
If there isn't a profile, I won't follow. If the words "muse," "Christ," "guru," "environmentalist" or any other self-aggrandizing, religious or political words are in the profile, my guess is the person has very little to offer.
Does the person only promote her blog, or does she present plenty of thoughtful tweets with links to important education tools or articles? Not to be picky, but I want people I follow to help me grow professionally.
If the person's Tweets are private, I won't ask to be approved. Twitter is a social network; unless you're using it with kids, your tweets should be public.
Finally, never follow a lengthy list of Twitter users, who promise to follow back. The idea of following just to be followed is a recipe for Twitter disaster.
