Are you tired of professional development that has no relevance to you?

You probably have asked this question many times in your professional life.  Today, there is a way to make professional development relavent to what you want to know more about  The tool to use is Twitter.  Many teachers see Twitter as a mechanism for students to make comments, but the educational  technology community has embraced Twitter as a resource to benefit teachers of all subject areas and specific subject areas.

First of all, what is Twitter?  Twitter is a web-based social media application that is limited to 140 characters.  You can create short comments abouta topic and even include links to websites.

I have a teacher friend that asked on Facebook who just opened a Twitter account and she asked if anyone over the age of 40 uses Twitter.  I automatically replied with "You can use it for Professional Development."

How can we use Twitter for professional development?  By the use of pound signs (#) we can create hashtags to signify a specific topic or a specific community that the comments or discussion is geared towards.  In the educational community there are many hashtags that are used.  There is #SSChat for Social Studies teachers, #EngChat for English teachers, and so forth.  Most of the educational community have specific chat times each week.  The community for Social Studies teachers is Monday evenings at 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern time each week.  There is also a Social Studies Chat Ning website that you can see a log of past discussions.

I have found many resources by using Twitter.  There are many educators that I have followed that are nationally respected in their field of study or in their schools.  They will post research, their experiences in the classroom, new discoveries, or even a joke every once in a while.

By following these people, you are creating your own personal professional development plan based around what you are interested in.

If you would like to follow me on Twitter, search for @richzukowski and add me as a follower and I will add you back.

This is a link from a website from Jerry Blumgarten who is known on the internet and Twitter community as "Cybraryman" due to his extensive website cataloging many aspects of education and techonology.   He is a retired librarian in the New York Public School system and has retired to Florida, but has continued to make great contributions to education into his retirement.  This link refers to using Twitter as professional development and in the classroom.
http://cybraryman.com/twitter.html

Search on Twitter for #SSChat:  https://twitter.com/search?q=%23sschat&src=typd
Twitter Chats for Education and the Moderators that Make Them Rock

I have been Tweeting from this conference using the hashtag #WVCofH

22 Effective Ways To Use Twitter In The Classroom

When you do find a technology that you would like to try, use it on a small sample class like a resource/reteach class.  If you find it useful, share with another teacher in your building or your district and hopefully you and your colleagues can share the resources by word of mouth.