We have asked you to create a personal learning network (PLN) based in Twitter. Many of you probably already have an account on Twitter that you use for personal reasons. To begin building your PLN, we suggest that you create a new account with a professional profile that better showcases your learning interests and segregates your professional persona from your personal life.
If you have never used Twitter or need to create another account, please go to Twitter.com and click the Sign Up button.
Below is the Twitter Sign up. Use your MHC email rather than your phone number. This will identify you as an educational user. Please think carefully about the personal information you are willing to provide to Twitter, e.g your phone number. Much of the personal information they request is not required to create an account and may be more than you are comfortable sharing.
Once you have created an account, build your profile to emphasize your interests in teaching and learning. This will also help identify you as a member of the educational community on Twitter and help you get followers. 
Welcome to Twitter!
This is a typical twitter home page. This is where tweets from those you are following will appear. If you want to see your own tweets, click on your profile in the drop down menu under your icon in the upper left corner. 
On Twitter, topics are categorized with Hashtags using the # symbol to designate a topic. Our class has its own hashtag (#mhced250 for Spring 2017 Edust-250LT). If you search for that hashtag, you will find that there are already a group of tweets directed to our class. There is a great blog post which lists and categorizes hashtags for educators on the teachthought blog.
To build your PLN, you will first want to search these hashtags to find educators and watch some of their tweeting. After you have identified some interesting educators, follow about 5 to 8 people who tweet regularly. You may also want to also follow some people in education that you know and admire.
Since tweets are currently restricted to 140 characters, tweeting is a great exercise in improving your writing. You will have to create succinct messages that clearly deliver your meaning.
Once you have become comfortable with the educational community on Twitter, you can start liking and retweeting some of the tweets you find particularly useful. You can build your own tweets by tweeting links and commentary from your readings and mail lists. Please remember to use our hashtag to share your tweets and retweets with the class.
Resources:
- The Twitter Help Center has many good resources for getting you started including Quick Answers to Basic Questions.
- Daily Genius blog: 5 Ways for Teachers to get Started on Twitter.
- Edudemic, connecting education & technology: The Teacher’s Guide to Twitter
- The Learner’s Way blog: Why build a Personal Learning Network
- Letter/character tools to facilitate composing your tweets: lettercounter.com, Twitter character counter
- Twitter is in the process of changing its rules for counting characters to give you a few more characters for your tweet. Android Authority has written a nice overview of the changed rules.
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