However, if you are an educator and you are using Twitter, it can still be quite a challenge to use it well. Twitter has over 300 million active users (and many more inactive) sending over 500 million tweets per day (about 6,000 tweets per second). Trying to get useful information from Twitter has often be compared to trying to take a sip of water from a fire hose.
For many years, I found myself in just that situation. I was a Twitter user but didn’t feel like I was making the best use of it. Just like any educator, the one thing I don’t have is spare time. I was miserably failing to keep up with the flood of tweets, or to pull out useful information from it. Watching the Twitter site felt like staring at the computer screen in the Matrix movie, trying to process the constant flow of cryptic symbols.
Recently though, that all changed. Using a simple collection of tools and processes, I was able to tame Twitter. For me this meant:
- Finding my Flock - following the appropriate people
- Crowdsourcing the Content - discovering relevant and valuable posts
- Listening at my Leisure - consuming it in a manner that fits my crazy life
See below for a detailed description of the tools and steps that have worked for me. These include Tweetdeck, hashtags, Twitter chats, Nuzzel, Pocket, and more. You may be familiar with some of these tools, but hopefully you will discover some new resources and see some options for putting them together to help you make the most out of Twitter.