Why I Tweet


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What’s the Big Deal about Twitter? (Why I Tweet)

 

As Jim Dornberg and I started discussing this 13 More Things class way back in January, the first thing we added was Twitter. Now after viewing the Twitter resources and setting up your account, you are probably wondering “What were they thinking? Why is everyone so wound up about this really stupid thing.” Trust me, I was in the same place a few months ago. Now it is the most important part of my personal professional development.  So what do I see in Twitter that you don’t? Let me see if I can explain it.

 

 

I tweet so that I can:

 

Wow, that’s a quite a list. This isn’t what Twitter was designed for. It was designed to let people keep up with friends and family.  However, the early adopters of this technology leveraged this medium to meet their needs. They changed twitter and made it a valuable resource for educators worldwide.

 

 

Let me show you how I use Twitter

 

 

How do I do all this? I do not use the web interface. There is no way to accomplish all of my goals with that interface.  I use Tweetdeck, an a free Adobe Air application. You can download it from http://tweetdeck.com. Tweetdeck allows you to make as many groups as you would like. In addition, click on a person’s avatar and there are buttons for @replying, retweeting, and many other options. This make Tweetdeck easy to use. You can link your Facebook account too.  I get a lot more out of Twitter when I can group my responses. See the page on groups for more information on groups.

 

Just so you get a better idea, here are a very few of the conversations that crossed my screen on 7/21.

You may have noticed some strange notations in the tweets so what follows is a marked up column that shows hashtags and a has a few comments about some of the tweets. Hopefully you’ll be able to see the kind of content I gain daily from twitter.

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I also mentioned that I made a few friends. Here are some of them.

 

There is a real live education community on Twitter and I encourage you to dive in. The people are friendly and very helpful. Enjoy.

 

 

PS. If you noticed the green borders or overlays on some of the avatars, those were added to protest the Iranian Election debacle.

 

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