Why Twitter is essential for every teacher

I firstly joined Twitter in an educational context when I created a class account around a year ago after reading an article about how it can be used to share work with parents and friends of the school. I had my own personal account where I followed friends, sports stars etc but had nothing to do with teaching - I had no idea the power of twitter as a teacher.

The class account shared examples of pupils work, homework, class news etc and received some good feedback from parents. It was only when I came out of the classroom and took on the roll of covering PPA with the iPads did I change it from a class account to a school account. Along with this I started our school blog - http://davyhulme.primaryblogger.co.uk. I was able to set up the blog to automatically tweet new posts to help spread our work and build our audience. We quickly started picking up followers when examples of the iPad work was being shared. Through the school account I was following others and gathering loads of ideas and tips and joining in with discussions about different educational issues. It was only after I tuned into a Teachmeet to see some of our work being shared by @Ideas_Factory  (See the video here) that he suggested I start my own Tweacher account. I quickly went about setting up my own teacher account as well as setting up this blog. I felt that although I had to still remember my position as a teacher but I could then give more personal views on topics also keep the account if I was to ever move schools etc.

Four months later, I have just notched up my 1,000 follower, I have been able to network and meet some incredibly inspiring teachers, get involved in teachmeets, provide training in other schools and LEARN SO MUCH to better myself as a teacher!!

So the next step - to try and convince other staff at my school to join the Twitter revolution!!!!!

I am going to share all the ideas that I have implemented this year through learning about them on twitter, these include:



If you are in the same boat as me and need to try and convince others to join, here are some links that may help:

But of course the best way to understand the power and the value of twitter is to use twitter itself and so I posted this tweet to try and get responses from teachers who are using twitter:


And so straight away within seconds I had a handful of responses - here are some of them:















I had so many overwhelming responses that I couldn't keep up with them all so decided to make this Google form and then share this through twitter to gain responses. Please add your ideas to this conversation and help me bring more teachers from my school to join twitter!!!!



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