One of the best things I have done this year for professional development is to participate in Twitter chats that interest me.

When I have talked to teachers about this, they seem overwhelmed by getting started, so I have added some instructions below on how to find chats that interest you, creating a Twitter account, tools that make it easier to chat, and chat etiquette.

Where to start:

1. Search this link  to add all of the educational Twitter chats to your Google Calendar.  See below for a diagram of what to click:

2. If you don’t already have a Twitter account, go here and sign up.  I put this step second, because I think it’s nice to have a reason to sign up first:)

3. Bookmark the Tweetdeck website and sign in with your new Twitter Account.  Here is what the dashboard looks like:

a. Click on the “+” button to add a column.

b. Choose the column type that you would like to add.  I like to add a notifications column and a search column for each chat I am trying to manage around the same time.  My standard setup is show above.

Click on two little lines at the top right of your column.  Click on “Content” and the dropdown box shown above will open.  Type in the hashtag for your chat in the “matching” text box.  There are lots of other options you can mess around with, but I find this simple setup is good enough for me.

4. Open Tweetdeck at the time your chat is scheduled to start and look for the first question.

5. The moderator will pose a questions labeled Q1: and you will respond to that question with “A1:.”  Follow this protocol for all answers respectively.  Make sure to add the hashtag for your chat onto your tweet.

Feel free to comment on other peoples comments and retweet great ideas!  A great way to grow you PLN (Personal Learning Network) is to follow people that you learn from!   This way you will see all of their tweets in your feed.

Please post questions and comments and I will try to address them in the comments.