Fast-forward a few years and I have had another, more successful, go with Twitter.
Here are the 5 tips I wish I knew back in 2009.
1. Limit the people you follow (to begin with). As mentioned above, following to many people can become overwhelming at first. Because you can follow anyone on Twitter, it is tempting to go crazy, hitting follow on all sorts of accounts. I liken this approach to trying to read 10 daily newspapers
simultaneously. You will inevitably get a lot of the same information - while also missing a lot of great stuff.
My more thought out approach is to follow local educators, people I know (or know of) and - most importantly - only Educators.
I consider my Twitter as a professional learning tool. If I really wanted to I could have a second 'personal' account - but I do not have a need for this currently.
If you are just starting out on Twitter, experiment with only following 10 - 20 local educators. You can always add more people as you get to understand the tool more.
2. Twitter Chats. One great way to discover local educators that actively use Twitter is joining in on a local Twitter chat. You do not need to join in the chat - or even follow it live. Simply search a hashtag within Twitter like #edcahtnz, #BFC630NZ or
#scichatnz and you will be able to read through tweets published under these chats. See something that inspires you? Favourite and/or retweet it then Follow that user!
Twitter chats are a great tool to prompt reflecting and critique your own practise, as well as gain insights into others ideas.
An awesome guide to #edchatnz (that can also be applied to other chats) is over at http://www.edchatnz.com/getting-started
3. Tweetdeck. I watched a couple of Twitter Chats in complete disbelief before I discovered Tweetdeck. I could not understand how people could possibly follow that many ideas at once! Tweetdeck changes all this and makes Twitter chats completely manageable (most of the time).
Others have explained Tweetdeck better than I can - like the explanation at http://www.theedublogger.com/2014/06/25/twitter-chats/ Just know that you should use it to be a part of Twitter Chats.
4. Purpose - It ain't email! Talking of following twitter chats, an important lesson that I never grasped in '09 was Twitter is not email or Facebook. You do not have to read every tweet in your feed. No one is going to require a response from you or be disappointed in your lack of 'liking' something.
Twitter is more like that old school friend that you never catch-up with, but when you do you hit if off every time. So do not worry if you don't catch every tweet sent - I estimate I would only read 10-20% of my twitter feed!
5. Saving content for later reads. Often something will grab my attention but I will not have time to follow-up. I used to 'favourite' items, but soon discovered that I had a heap of favourite tweets - and I had no way of filtering them (yes, I admit I once copied and pasted all my favourite tweets into a Google Doc...)
My solution to this now is a quick 'favourite/star' within Twitter which then triggers a recipe to run in IFTTT that in turn creates a note in EverNote. The advantages of this is that I can organise these tweets within EverNote and delete them when I am finished with them. If you use Pocket you can use a similar recipe. See my post here for more IFTTT recipe recommendations.
Finally, what no one ever told me about Twitter is that it is actually not a 'simple tool'!
New #sketchnote: Should You Use Twitter?(Flowchart) cc @coolcatteacher #edtech @edutopia @TeachThought @MindShiftKQED pic.twitter.com/O6PbzAeW9t
— Sylvia Duckworth (@sylviaduckworth) August 20, 2015
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