Exercise Eight: Join the Twitter community.
Since its start in 2006, Twitter has become something of a global phenomenon and a staple of mainstream media. Just about every major news agency, celebrity, and cultural institution is now on Twitter. Still, there are many who wonder "Why Twitter has become so popular?" While there are many reasons for its success, on a personal level, Twitter is a useful tool for learning from others, researching a topic of interest, and keeping up with news happenings as they break around the globe. To view it another way, Paul Stewart created this video on Animoto to show all the things he uses Twitter for.
If you haven't joined Twitter yet, it's easy to sign up for a free account and discover for yourself what it’s all about. On the Twitter homepage, click on "Sign up now." After typing in your first and last name, choose a username that is descriptive, but not too long. With Twitter, you only get 140 characters per message, or "tweet," so use them wisely! To finish setting up your account, you'll have some decisions to make in terms of what personal information you want to provide, including what city you live in, a URL for a blog or website if you have one, an image to serve as your profile picture, and whether to make your "tweets" public on not.
While you may be leery of posting personal information on the Internet, not offering any personal information or deciding to make your tweets private are "turn offs" for many people on Twitter. Another "turn off" is not posting something to serve as your profile picture (see Exercise Two). Twitter is about conversation, knowledge sharing, and building relationships. It's about "following" others and being "followed" yourself. But, none of this is likely to happen if you don't tell people something about yourself like what you do for a living (e.g., "I'm an art teacher.") or if you decide to keep your tweets private. Other tips:
- Once your account is set up, you need to create a network of people and organizations to follow and that will follow you. Doing this will generate a timeline of tweets that show up on your home page. Start by inviting colleagues and friends to join Twitter, if they haven't done so already. Try searching Twitter's public timeline (search.twitter.com) using keywords that describe you and your interests (e.g., "art teacher" or "NBCT"). Browse through the results and read the authors' profiles of messages that attract your attention. If you find someone you'd like to follow, click on the "follow" button under his or her icon. Also, look at the people they follow for more possibilities. Lastly, see Twitter4Teachers for a list of teachers on Twitter by grade level and subject area. Add your name to that list. Another place to find art teachers to follow is on wefollow.
- When browsing Twitter's timeline, notice that messages follow a certain syntax and that some symbols often get repeated. It may help to know some of this "Twitter lingo" before you get started. For instance, every message begins with the username of the person who sent it. Clicking on the username will take you to that person's Twitter page. If you see a "@" in front of a username (for example, @craigr), it indicates that a conversation is going on between two people with one person replying to the other or that someone is simply acknowledging or pointing to another user. If you see RT in front of a username and message that means someone is passing on or "retweeting" someone else's tweet. Also, while tweets are usually public, you can send a private or direct message (DM) to another user who follows you by placing a "D" in front of their username (e.g, D craigr).
- Twitter users often make use of a great deal of shorthand, such as "u" for "you", "thx" for "thanks," "r" for "are," and so on. While long URLs are usually truncated automatically in Twitter messages, when that doesn't happen you may need to do it manually by copying and pasting your URL into a site like TinyUrl.com to get a shorter URL to include in your tweet.
- Lastly, remember that the best way to get people to follow you is to use Twitter regularly to add "value" to the global conversation, to reflect on what's happening in your classroom, and to raise questions or share resources that might interest other art teachers. For additional tips on getting started with Twitter, read Darren Rowse’s 10 Easy Steps for Twitter Beginners and check out the additional resources included in this site.
