Three out of the six women in my family are Canadian educators and it wouldn’t surprise me if my sister-in-law decided to become a French teacher. I started writing some tips on Twitter after my mom-in-law Carol published the book A Salmon’s Sky View and started her own Twitter account (@salmonskyview). But then I realized that these tips might be broad enough to be useful for other teachers. Below is the Twitter 101 for Teachers. I know Carol is likely beyond this level of understanding, but I want to make sure I cover the basics before we get crazy with it:

140 CHARACTERS: The poor grammar associated with a 140 character limit tends to be irksome for teachers. Using “4” instead of “for” or “u” instead of “you” are just some of the ways to reduce your character count. Many people also use tools like http://bit.ly/ to shorten website URLs. I like bit.ly because if you type + at the end of the shortened link in your address bar, you can see the number of people who’ve clicked through on your link and where that traffic is coming from.

FOLLOW & @REPLY PEOPLE: When you see an interesting profile of someone you want to talk to, follow them on Twitter and then @reply them. Basically, the format is “@readingquest loved your comprehension training workshop, got any links for follow up resources?” If they’ve followed you back then you can send them a private tweet by going to their profile and clicking the message button.

LISTS: One way to keep up-to-date with things happening in the teaching community is to create lists. In the new Twitter, when you go to someone’s page you can follow them and click the list button on the right hand side of the white box to create a list. Rather than just creating lists entitled “teachers” or “tech”, be choosy with who you add to lists as other people may come along and follow your really useful ones. For example, if you title a list “publishers accepting submissions in Victoria” that’s probably better than “publishers”.

ENGAGEMENT: If you’ve got a profile pic and a proper description, then people are less likely to think you’re a spam bot and more likely to interact with you. You also don’t want to have a ratio of 10,000 people you follow to only 100 followers. Apart from these ideas, this type of tweet tends to get the highest reactions:
1. Using @reply to start a conversation (many people have mobile alerts to tell them when someone has mentioned them);
2. Asking a question either to a specific person or to the larger community;
3. Sharing a link to a useful resource;
4. Sharing a link to a useful twitter list; and of course,
5. Saying something insightful, funny, unique and/or provocative (good or bad).

ADVANCED SEARCH: If you go to http://twitter.com/search-advanced you can search for specific keywords within a few kilometers of your hometown. If you search for “teacher” you’ll see results for every tweet with the word “teacher” in it, but if you tab over the “tweets with links” and “people” you might find more relevant matches. Play with different keyword combos to come up with good lists.

INFLUENCERS: I’m not savvy to the movers and shakers of the British Columbia educational arena but Adrienne Gear seems to be a big influencer for reading programs. Nevertheless, after emailing her I found out that she does not have a Twitter account. She does however offer a list of links on her website. Some of her linkees have Twitter accounts including:


Others you might want to @reply to or just follow include:

ADVOCACY: Once you’ve got a healthy following and when the BC Teachers Federation inevitably has to renegotiate and bargain, one way you can use your Twitter following for good is by @replying politicians and asking them about the process. Current BC Minister of Education George Abbott’s handle is @georgeabbott4bc. If you want to stir the pot with others, here’s a spreadsheet of a bunch of the BC Ministers’ Twitter handles. And if you want to shame a politician AND start a media coup, @reply both the Minister and your favorite media personality from this list: http://mediaontwitter.pbworks.com/w/page/20687497/Canada-MediaOnTwitter.