From the blogosphere to the cover of Newsweek, you are bound to have at least heard of Twitter.  You may have even created a twitter account just to find yourself talking to …. yourself and really not understanding the twerrific tweet fascination.

Why are some people’s Twitter experience totally different from others?

Let’s start first where we ask our students to begin when posed with a question–research. Before you get started in twitterverse, shouldn’t you know a bit about it?

I’m a teacher, so I wanted to find out how Twitter could be used in my classroom or to make me a more effective teacher.   I started simple enough by just creating an account and watching the twitterverse from the main Twitter page.  I must admit I wasn’t instantly impressed.  There had to be more to the whole “Twitter Phenomenon”. How were teachers using this when every other tweet wasn’t appropriate for the classroom?

Surely Google could help me out with this one!  I started searching for educational uses for Twitter and realize that my use of Twitter was probably going to be more to build my effectiveness as a teacher and not necessarily as a classroom tool for students.  Now, there aren’t any set rules for using Twitter, and this was just how I decided to use Twitter.

One great finding in my research was Twitter Groups.  I was able to easily join a variety of educational groups as well as groups that would help expand my resources for various units such as photography:) Day by day I started having people follow me from the various groups.  Day by day I read through great ideas and resources.  Day by day I continued to research.

One of the best suggestions came from @suewaters  One of her suggestions was to ask one of your favorite tweeters to ask his/her followers to follow you (not her exact words:).  Which also leads me to a great Twitter resource, Sue’s Blog.

Twitter has become one of the best ways I have expanded my PLN.  Here are just a few ways I have use Twitter since my first tweet:

• Ask questions
• Hash Tag posts while posting on f2f workshop
• Save favorite tweets
• Attend various meet-ups and PD internationally
• Check out resources
• Answer questions
• Pretend I was attending NECC by following others NECC experience
• Post resources
• LOL
• Search for unit and class resources using “search”
• FOFL (usually @philhart or @johart )
• ReTweet and be ReTweeted
• COLLABORATE
• and my favorite….shared a pic of my boys and 81 yo grandfather climbing a “mountain” hunting for shark teeth in Kansas.  Who would have thought someone in my PLN was actually interested in visiting Kansas?!