More Tips

• Replace the stock profile image with YOUR picture (not a picture of your pet, your feet, or some generic image)
• Add a hashtag to your tweets for this event such as #tceamg
• Start building your PLN by following people at your table that you want to learn from (more recommendations below)

• Get Pocket.com: This remains my favorite content tool. Anything I find on my mobile device or on my computer, I promptly save to Pocket. Since it is everywhere and works well with other tools, it makes saving content easy. Getting content out is also straightforward. More on that later.
• Diigo.com for Educators: An oldy but goody, social bookmarking with Diigo is a cinch on computers, not so much on mobile. Still, the benefit of Diigo is that you can turn every item you save to it into a tagged item. Tags in Diigo come with RSS feeds (learn more about RSS), which make it easy to share to Twitter and other places. Using the free for Educators account comes with additional benefits.
• Flipboard.com: A fantastic curation tool since anything you “flip” into a digital magazine (ezine for short) becomes an easy-to-share resource with others. People can subscribe and leave comments. Imagine creating a flipboard ezine for your class on a particular topic or having students collaborate and contribute to a shared ezine. Flipboard makes it possible, and viewing is a pure pleasure.

From The TechEdvocate

• Get feedback from students: Ask students to tweet you their questions, comments, and more. Keep a running list of what your students are saying or have questions about. You can address their thoughts in class or on twitter.
• Show off your classroom: Live tweeting what’s going on is a fun way to keep parents in the loop. It also allows students to look back on what you’ve done during the school year.
• Get students summarizing: Asking them to summarize what they’ve learned is a great way to see what students remember. It also forces them to think critically about what information was most important. Forcing them to tell their thoughts in only 140 characters is challenging and fun.
• Connect with other classes: Join your classroom with another via Twitter. Let your students use a classroom twitter handle to tweet back and forth with another class across the country or the world.
• Make Twitter the homework: Instead of a boring worksheet, have students tweet about assigned readings. Students can tweet a summary of a chapter or respond to a question via twitter. The best part is, they can do this homework from anywhere without pencil and paper.
• Tweet as a historic figure: Have students create a Twitter account for a person from history. Have them tweet about major events in that person’s life as they think their historic figure would have tweeted. This can also work with fictional characters.

From TeachHub

• Coordinate assignments: Rather than keeping up with an e-mail train, students can use Twitter to collaborate on different projects and keep a quick reference on any changes.
• Follow the issues: Bring a little technology into debates by asking the class which issues they would like to follow. Subscribe to relevant hash tags and accounts from all perspectives and compile an updated resource cobbling together as much research as possible.
• Write a story or poem: Many writers and poets have experimented with Twitter’s 140-character format to bring new, serialized works in small chunks to attention-divided audiences. Some educators may like the idea of asking their students to apply their creative writing skills to a restrictive social media outlet.
• Live tweet field trips: Sick kids or paranoid parents may like the idea of following along with class field trips on Twitter, and smart phone-enabled teachers can keep them engaged with pictures and descriptions of the lessons learned.
• Set up a foreign language news stream: Keep foreign language students informed of current events from relevant nations while simultaneously challenging them to use their translation skills by keeping a specific news feed.
• Live tweet a book or a movie: Ask students to use the microblog format to record their initial reactions and responses to movies and books as they indulge in them for class. It certainly makes for an excellent lesson in how perceptions change over time as more information and perspectives become available.

From TeachThought

• CREATING IMAGINATIVE DIALOGUES: Illinois high school English teacher Tracee Orman uses Twitter to enrich the learning experience of Hunger Games, asking students to tweet as if they were a character from a chapter in the book. This is a fun way to engage students in the content that they’re studying, and a great practice in learning empathy and understanding of characters.
• UPGRADING UNDERAPPRECIATED SCHOOL NEWSPAPERS: In some schools, high school newspapers just aren’t getting the attention they used to, as students are often glued to phones, tablets, and laptops much more regularly than anything representing real paper. Some school newspapers are now using Twitter as a way to aggregate news information, tweet stories as they happen, and interact with their audience through questions and polls. Freedom High student journalists in Pennsylvania’s Bethlehem Township often live-tweet updates about football games right from the stands, sharing news for those who can’t make it to the game.
• WORLDWIDE CONNECTIONS: Adam Taylor’s class at Nashville’s Overton High School connects with students half a world away in Pakistan, and they’re quite enthusiastic about it. The two classes discuss student voices in school, cultural stereotypes, and more, learning what life is like outside of their own classroom and culture. Taylor’s idea has been quite popular, and is even such a great draw that students are willing to come in early to school for the discussions.
• VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES: One nonprofit group, Jersey Cares, targets tweets to find volunteers to fill their recruitment needs, and has found that many high schoolers answer the call. High school groups use Twitter to locate projects in their area where they can help out, since so many nonprofits are speaking out and asking for help on the social media service.
• REAL-TIME SOURCE EVALUATION: Using Twitter, students are able to tweet sources and ask their teacher, fellow classmates, and others that they engage with on Twitter whether it seems to be a credible source or not. This is a great way to teach about the use of online resources and learning about which sources are reliable, and which shouldn’t be trusted.

More Tips available online: 60 Examples