1) The document provides guidance for teachers on how to sign up for and effectively use Twitter for professional learning and collaboration. It explains how to find people to follow through your email contacts and relevant organizations, and how to search Twitter to find more people based on subject area or hashtag topics. 2) Key Twitter features covered include the timeline, profile stats, trends, expanding tweets, retweeting, mentioning others, searching, and using hashtags to organize conversations. Shortened URLs and the 140 character limit are also addressed. 3) Teachers are encouraged to join conversations by contributing their thoughts, sharing websites, and using hashtags and retweets to find audiences and spread information concisely.

1. Twitter for Teachers 2.0 Al Rowell @locotechTechnology Director Lowndes County Schools Georgia

2. Twitter: Signing Up From twitter.com click on Sign Up. Complete the web form, review the Terms of Service, and click Create my account.

3. Twitter: Who to Follow? Twitter will give you the opportunity to search your online email address books for contacts on Twitter, and you can click Find on Twitter to search by name or Twitter name. Don’t forget to look for your professional organizations on Twitter. Here’s a great place to find teachers: http://twitter4teachers.pbworks.com/

4. Twitter: Collecting People to Follow As you read tweets in your subject area, you will notice people who share items of the most interest to you. When you click on their @twitternames in the timeline, you’ll see their profile info. Click +Follow to follow them. [You can always change your mind later!]

5. Twitter: Navigating the New Interface

6. Twitter: The Timeline The timeline is a list of tweets from the persons you follow with the most recent first.

7. Twitter: Your Stats on Twitter At a glance you can see how many tweets you have sent, the text of your last tweet, your favorite tweets you’ve saved, how many you follow, how many follow you, and where you have been listed. Click the headings for details.

8. Twitter: Tracking the Trends Confused about a Trending Topic? Check out whatthetrend.com Trends are the words and phrases that are currently appearing most often on Twitter. From the significant ( #IranElection ) to the peculiar ( maple syrup [blame Justin Bieber]). Click a trend for the tweets!

9. Twitter: Details on a Tweet Click on a tweet in your timeline for an expanded view.

10. Twitter: Anatomy of a Tweet The challenge of Twitter is communicating in 140 characters or less. In this tweet, @web20classroom shares a website. He describes it and then includes the site. To save those valuable characters he used bit.ly to shorten the web address (URL). Twitter also lets you know his tweet has been shared (re-tweeted) by 4 other persons.

11. Twitter: The Art of the @Reply Hover over a tweet in the timeline to reveal the Reply link. Click it to open the Reply window, which will start with @ and the twittername. The recipient will see the tweet in his or her Mentions list. Replies are semi-public. They will be viewable in your tweets under your profile but will not show to your followers in their timeline unless they follow you and the person to whom you were replying.

12. Twitter: Mentioning Others You can mention a person using the @ symbol and their Twitter name anywhere in a tweet. As long as the mention does not occur at the very beginning (that’s a reply!), it will be visible to anyone following you and will appear in that person’s list of mentions.

13. Twitter: The Classic Re-Tweet When you see a tweet you want to share with your followers, Twitter etiquette requires that you credit the originator by preceding their tweet with “RT @twittername” Here @katiemorrow credits @limbert65 for this link to the Cyberbullying article.

14. Twitter: Re-Tweeting has Changed The new re-tweet is much more subtle. In the timeline instead of RT you will see a pair of arrows in a right-angle loop followed by the name of the person who re-tweeted. Here, @ShellTerrell re-tweeted @nashworld’s tweet. When you click on Retweet under a message, this is how Twitter now sends out the tweet to your followers.

15. Twitter: What is a #hashtag? With 50 million tweets being sent through Twitter every day, how do you make sense of it all? Hashtags are the labels created by the Twitter community to designate topics. For more hashtags see http://www.cybraryman.com/edhashtags.html

16. Twitter: Searching You can search for ANYTHING on Twitter. Click in the small search field with the magnifying glass and type your search term. Try a book your class is reading, a teaching strategy, professional organization, TV show, web 2.0 tool…anything! And when you are done with that, try searching for a hashtag like #elemchat If you like the results, save the search. When you return to your searches tab and click on a search, it will refresh with the most current results.

17. Twitter: Ready to Tweet? It’s your time to join the conversation! Type your thoughts, share a website, contribute to a chat. Remember to use hashtags to find your audience and URL shorteners to save those precious characters.

18. Resources Blumengarten, Jerry. “Some Educational Hashtags.” Cybrary Man's Educational Web Sites. http://www.cybraryman.com/edhashtags.html Parr, Ben. “HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Twitter #Hashtags.” Mashable.com http://mashable.com/2009/05/17/twitter-hashtags/ Terrell, Shelly. “#Edchat: Join the Conversation.” Teacher Reboot Camp. http://teacherbootcamp.edublogs.org/2009/08/18/edchat-join-the-conversation/ “Twitter 101: Twitter Terminology.” Geekette Bits http://geekettebits.com/technology/twitter-101-twitter-terminology/