Twitter in Education

Do you know the feeling you get after a really great professional development session? You know, that feeling of a fire deep inside of you that makes you want to go to your classroom and do something! Well, Twitter is not that. But, I'm sure you also know that same feeling a week after a really great PD session. That feeling of let-down that is the result of other staff members not sharing in your excitement or problems in implementing your new, grand ideas. Twitter can help with that feeling of let-down. To continue the fire metaphor, I like to equate the post-PD fire to a great conflagration; it cannot be stopped except with the passage of time because eventually, it will burn itself out because it runs out of fuel. Twitter adds fuel to that fire. Twitter keeps that fire going and going and going.

If you are in education and you are not on Twitter, you are doing yourself a disservice of Brobdingnagian proportions. Twitter is being leveraged by educators across the country and around the world to develop professional learning networks (PLNs) to support each other through sharing of ideas, materials, answers to questions, and stories. Twitter is the great flattener in education. No longer do you have to wait for a conference to interact with the gurus and rock stars of education today. Got a question for Rick Wormelli? Tweet it. Thomas Guskey? Tweet it. Most of the time, these and other big names in education will respond to your tweet. Want to criticize Arne Duncan? Tweet it with the hashtag #edchat and literally tens of thousands of educators everywhere will see it. Need help coming up with ideas for a psychology project on the brain or do you want feedback on your lesson plan? Tweet it with the hashtag #psychat. Even if you don't want to actively post tweets, you can still leverage Twitter to keep that fire burning year round. By simply following the right people, signing on during Twitter chats that interest you, and following the right hashtags, you will be exposed to an overwhelming number of ideas and resources. The learning curve for understanding how to navigate the Twitterverse is fairly easy for digital natives and entirely manageable for digital immigrants. Even if it takes you a week of fifteen or twenty minute sessions to familiarize yourself with the literacy and navigation skills necessary for easily accessing all that Twitter has to offer, that investment of time will pay back tremendous dividends!

As a school leader, Twitter presents tremendous opportunity. Twitter can be used as a sort of support group for new administrators. Twitter can be used as a place to learn from experienced administrators by simply "following" them on Twitter. Many, many, many accomplished principals, superintendents, and other administrators are on Twitter such as Eric Sheninger, former Scholastic principal of the year; George Couros, rockstar principal from Alberta, Canada; Myron Dueck, principal and author of Grading Smarter, Not Harder; Todd Whitaker, principal and author of Shifting the Monkey; and Joe Sanfelippo, superintendent at Fall Creek School District in Wisconsin who is the model for leveraging social media to create a brand identify for a district, #GoCrickets. This is just a sampling of the many great minds and leaders who share their experiences and ideas on Twitter every single day. Twitter can also be used by school leaders in a way that Joe Sanfelippo does: He is constantly sharing all the great things that happen in his school district on Twitter with pictures and videos under the hashtag #GoCrickets. As a result, he creates a sense of ambient intimacy and connectedness within the community which results in very positive attitudes about the school, the teachers, and the administration. 

This is a sample of my Tweetdeck which is a platform for organizing Twitter. Across the top of this image are the categories and below them are the tweets that have been posted under those categories. The categories include #psychat, for teachers of psychology; #iolahs, for teachers at Iola-Scandinavia High School; #1to1techat, for all things related to one-to-one technology programs; #wischat, for teachers in Wisconsin; #SBLchat for all things related to standards based learning; and #ptchat, where ideas about improving the parent-teacher relationship are posted. These are just six of my nearly twenty different columns for different topics that I follow.