Using Twitter as an Educational Tool

I love learning in depth things about tech products I already think I know well.  Whenever you think you know quite a bit about something and can't learn more about it, you're in trouble.

Before you continue reading, if you want a site that has quite a bit of introductory information about Twitter, click here.

The last few days have been spent at Leyden High School for their Chromebooks 1 to 1 Summer Symposium.  They were amazing hosts, and we learned invaluable information during those three days.  That's for another blog post that I'm working on that has much more information about what I took away from the conference.

What surprised me is how fully and quickly everyone at the conference embraced Twitter for real time sharing, commenting, and networking.  Thinking to myself: "I already know that Twitter can be a useful tool", I started Tweeting using the set #LHS1to1 and got going.

It was awesome.

People were FAST sharing all day.  During Keynotes especially (and they were great) from +Jaime Casap, +Chris Lehmann, and +George Couros - each time there was a powerful and/or witty quote? BAM! Tweeted with the hash tag.

+George Couros even shared a list he created in Twitter of great tech follows (you can see his list here) for everyone to check out.  I did, and he was right.  There's some awesome ideas being shared all the time on Twitter from educators all around the world.

That inspired me to create my own list of Educators and school accounts for West Ottawa.

The BEST way to follow everything at once while at a conference or event is to watch that hash tag in real time either on the Twitter.com website and searching the # of your choice, or by using a really cool web app called TweetDeck. (pictured below)

With TweetDeck, you can see multiple feeds at once of different things, all of which is easily to customize.  In my example above, I've got my own timeline, then any interactions (anytime someone else mentions me, retweets me, or favorites one of my tweets), then Tweets from anyone on the "WO Follows" Twitter list I just created, plus any Tweets from the conference hash tag, #atplc.

It was great to see other educators sharing their thoughts and perceptions of what we were experiencing as they were happening at the conference.

What ways can we utilize this tool more effectively to communicate with teachers, students and parents?