Image credit: by Robin Hutton. CC Licensed via Flickr
You can find this post again at http://is.gd/tmswands
I’m off to do 2 minutes at a Swansea Teachmeet tonight about using Twitter and blogs as a global extended staffroom, so I thought I’d pull everything together here as a resource for anyone from the talk, or anyone who might find it interesting.
1. Twitter.
I don’t know if other professions have taken to Twitter like teachers have, but there is now a wealth of expertise out there in a growing community of educators.
I asked on Twitter for comments for you. This is what a few people said…
Once you’ve signed up, you need to find some people to follow. One way of doing this is looking for hashtags (the things that start with the # symbol).
Try a few of these to get you going
#ukedchat
#addcym
#hwbdysgu
#historyteacher (try putting your subject in front of the word teacher and see what you get)
#sltchat
#pedagoofriday
You’re also welcome to follow me (@davestacey) and say hello – I’ll happily retweet that. It’s worth filling in your bio with a little detail to help other people decide if they’re going to follow you or not. You also need to give some thought to if you want to use your real name, and if this is a personal account, a professional account, or even one to use for communicating to students / parents as a department
2. When 140 Characters isn’t enough…
Lots of teachers are also blogging. A blog being a simple publishing platform to share reflections with others. You can find blogs via Twitter, or through a search engine. You can use a service like Feedly to bring these together in the same way that Twitter brings together tweets from all the people you follow. Have a look at this post for more information.
It’s easy to get your own blog, but it can be a slightly lonely experience, recently StaffRm was created – a services that’s a cross between a blog and Twitter (you get 500 words instead of 140 characters, but it comes with a community of teachers already engaged and posting.
It’s free to join, and I would thoroughly recommend that you do. You can find out what a few people had to say about StaffRm in the comments on this post.
If you’re worried you’re never going to have anything to right about you can also join the #28daysofwriting scheme, where people commit to try and blog for 28 minutes a day, for 28 days in the month. It’s a great excuse for getting some posts under your belt, and loads of others will be doing it to. There’s even suggestions for topics if your inspiration runs dry!
Of course, you can also get your students blogging too, but that’s something for another post and another talk…