5 Excellent New Twitter Tools for Teachers

February 9, 2015
Twitter is one of the best platforms for creating and growing your personal/professional learning network (PLN). The strength of this microblogging tool lies in its easy accessibility and its sweeping widespread among a larger and diversified base of users. Creating a PLN in Twitter starts with following Tweetors whose tweets can potentially be of an added value to you. A rule of thumb here is that before you follow anyone, make sure you peruse through the tweets they have been sharing and see if they intersect with your own interests and goals. If so, use the snowballing strategy to find other similar Tweetors to follow. In other words, when you find somebody worthy of following, check their following list,  chances are he/she is following other like-minded people you might want to add to your PLN as well.

Hashtags are another important  tools to use to enrich your PLN. Look for hashtags related to your area of interest and check the people who are using them.  Check out this guide to learn more about how to use the concept of hashtags. I am also sharing with you a bunch of interesting third party web tools that can help you make the best of your educational tweeting experience. The tools I picked out for you today are meant to assist you tap into the full educational potential of your Twitter PLN.

1- Twilert

This is a tool similar to Google Alert. It provides you with real-time alerts through email  when tweets containing the hashtags or keywords you specified are mentioned.

2- Hashtagify

This is an advanced hashtag search engine that allows you to type in the name of a hashtag and search for relevant tags, conversations and influencers related to that hashtag.

3- Nuzzel

Nuzzel provides you with an easy clutter-free platform where you can keep updated about what your friends are sharing on both Twitter and Facebook.

4- Trends24

Trends24 allows you to keep track of the trending topics and tweets in the country you specify. You can select any country you want and Trends24 will provide you with a break-down of the trending tweets in it by minutes, hours and days.

5- Twchat

Twchat allows you to “create realtime chat rooms based on twitter hashtag. Invite users and perform the presentations online without any additional software! Add your friends or colleagues to help you with moderation.All you need is to sign in with twitter.”

For more Twitter tools, check out this comprehensive list.

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Tow of The Best Twitter Tools for Teachers

January, 2015
There are several third party tools out there that would enable you to enhance your tweeting experience, below is the editor's choice of two of the best web tools to use with your Twitter. As a teacher, using these tools will help you expand and enrich your professional learning experience by enabling you to follow like minded people, create lists to crowdsource information around a particular topic, read your Twitter stream in a magazine-like format, and make the best of the networking potential of hashtags.

1- TweetDeck

TweetDeck is by far the best of them all. I use TweetDeck app on my Mac and it works wonders. It lets you create lists and collections around a specific topic. I have a list titled Educational Technology  to which I added a number of popular EdTech Tweeters. TweetDeck allows you to track Twitter feeds of the people you follow in real time and has a notification column where you can see tweets mentioning you. I would suggest that you tinker around with the different features it has to learn more about how it works.

2- Paper.ly

This is a great tool for creating magazines from your Twitter feeds. To start using it you need to sign in using your Twitter account. Once logged in, click on "create a paper", give it a title and short description then choose what you want to be featured in your magazine. You can for instance create  a magazine from only your Twitter feeds, or from Tweets from your timeline or use both of them in one single page. You have a lot of options to choose from. You can also change the template and themes of your magazine and customize the fonts and text as you want. I personally use Paper.ly to read Tweets on my timeline.

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