Helping Tweachers Fly:  A post extolling the virtues of a Professional Development Network.

What's a tweacher, you ask? 'Tweacher' if a nifty little neologism referring to teachers who use Twitter for professional networking, keeping current of new trends, and broadcasting information. I am rather proud to be a tweacher although I have yet to maximize my presence in tweacherland.

So if you have rejected or avoided twitter because of the endless, inane minutia that clogs so many twitter feeds, I encourage you to reconsider.  You can tailor your twitter feed to suit your needs.  In fact, if you are clever, you can divert some of those widely-broadcast, list-serve-style emails that languish in your inbox, taunting you each time you check in.   The result of such a transition?  Once you've read a tweet, you can decide if you're interested enough to click whatever link is embedded.  If the bait doesn't appeal to you, ignore it.  There's nothing to delete and no backlog of mail to finish sort through, By 'following', as it's known on Twitter, organizations I was able to unsubscribe from their email lists.  In fact, I am continuing to look for ways to move towards using Twitter to receive information, as opposed to using my email inbox, which is so overburdened that it can take hours to read and clean out what accumulates in a matter of weeks.  For the English Language Arts teachers out there, I currently follow the National Council of the Teachers of English, ASCD, the International Reading Association, the National Writing Project, the Poetry Foundation, Education Week, the New York Times, just to name a few.  


(2) Follow your advocacy groups:  I follow the National Council of the Teachers of English, the International Reading Association, the National Education Association, Education Week, and ASCD.  As soon as I realized that I was getting the same information in my email box, I unsubscribed from these organization's email lists.  Now I can read my Twitter feed, decide if a title looks interesting, and follow a link if I so choose .  If the article isn't appealing then I ignore it.  This one simple adjustment has saved me from some of the tedium of sorting through endless email updates.