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Digital Storytelling for teachers

Índice Twitter. The Basics ...... 2 Twitter. The Basics ...... 2 Setting up a Twitter account ...... 2 Followers and ...... 3 Managing Twitter ...... 4 Learn more ...... 5

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Digital Storytelling for teachers

Twitter. The Basics

Twitter. The Basics

A key component of establishing social and learning networks is to allow your contacts to be aware of your work. Your contacts can be notified about your activities and you can also immediately post news and action items.

Twitter is like a response system that allows you to contact almost instantly with other people using just 140 characters. When you follow a person you will receive their called tweets (140 character-messages) and when they follow you back they receive yours. People who you both follow will receive messages you send each other.

Image by Aha-Soft at Iconfinder. Free for commercial use.

Setting up a Twitter account

It is quite easy to set up a Twitter account .

Launch a web browser and type the following address in the web address field: https://twitter.com/

Then, just Sign up for Twitter, fill in the necessary details and create your account.

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Digital Storytelling for teachers

Think carefully about your username; Using your real name is a good choice, because branding with one unique and recognizable online identity is better.

Make sure you upload a picture, complete your bio and add your URL (for a link to your website, blog, wiki, etc) because Twitter users check these out carefully when deciding if it’s worth following you and they get in touch more confidently if they can see who you are.

Followers and Hashtags

Followers and Following

The effective management of Twitter lies with the number of people you decide to follow, how you decide who to follow and your aim at using Twitter. That is going to influce how effective your Twitter conversations will be and how much juice you are going to get out of Twitter.

The easiest way to find and add people to your Twitter account might be to contact an experienced Twitter user so they ask their Twitter network to add you, but you must make sure you follow them back; it is good manners and netiquette, too!

You might also find it useful to suscribe to lists of Twitter users, who are most often grouped around interests, professional skills and so on.

Here you are some interesting Twitter lists to suscribe:

• ESL ideas • Teaching English • ESL teachers • Teachers • ICT Education • English Teachers • ESL group • ELT

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Digital Storytelling for teachers

• EduTwitter

You might prever to use a service that helps you find interesting people to follow. Here you are six advisable services to take into account:

• Twtrland. Social media analytics portal • Nearby Tweets. Find Twitter users close to your location • Wefollow. Discover prominent people • Topsy. Search and analyze the social web • @Magic Recs. A Twitter experiment. Follow them to receive instant, personalized recommendations for users and content via direct message.

Make a commitment to tweet for some time because it always takes a while to appreciate the values of new tools and try to find the time to have conversations with people and to value what you are achieving from using Twitter.

Start initially by following a bunch of people, but not too many, because if you follow too few people you won't necessarily appreciate its potential, but if you follow too many, it can turn out overwhelming at first.

Hashtags

The , #, is a way for Twitter users to organize themselves: if everyone agrees to use a certain hashtag to tweet about a topic, it becomes easier to find that topic when searching. Hashtags are also picked by event organisers when launching Twitter chats, for instance, or when announcing any type of event, so they reach the maximum number of attendants and participants.

During this course, we are all going to use one hashtag, #storytelling_INTEF so all of us will identify the course tweets simply searching for the hashtag. Besides, the Twitter widget we have in the online classroom will also gather all your hashtagged tweets.

Managing Twitter

Another effective way to manage Twitter is to use a Twitter client, which is a must. The power of Twitter is in the instant notification and response to tweets of people you follow, so instant updates are essential, and using a web interface does not provide you with that.

You might like some useful Twitter clients like the ones below:

• TweetDeck • • Twitter Link Monitor • Twitterrific (for Mac)

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Digital Storytelling for teachers

Learn more

For further exploration about Twitter:

• Twitter FAQs and the basics • Get the most out of Twitter hashtags • Top Twitter hashtags for Teachers • Twitter for Teachers • Building a PLN on Twitter • Educational Hashtags • 20 ways to use Twitter with your students • 50 ways to use Twitter in the classroom • Educational uses of Twitter • PLN yourself • Guide to using Twitter in your teaching practice • 30 Education Innovators Worth Following on Twitter

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 4.0

Formación en Red del INTEF

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence.

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