On Twitter, your “feed” is composed of all of the tweets posted by those you follow.

As a new user on Twitter, you want to craft a feed that meets your learning needs.  This means that you will need to follow Twitter users who tend to share the things you want to learn about.  If you are a grade 9 Geography teacher, you may want to follow other grade 9 Geography teachers (if extending your practice in this area is your main purpose for being on Twitter).

However, you may also want to follow educators who add to your PLN in a more general way, such as those who challenge our thinking around assessment and those who are learning more about inquiry learning in the classroom.

Unlike social media sites like Facebook, you don’t need permission to follow other people on Twitter.

Unlike other social media sites, on Twitter you won’t even attempt to read everything posted by those you follow.  Twitter has tools to help you separate out the really important information from the “stream” that you have created, and we will explore these in the next few days.

Today we are focusing on creating a rich stream of information.

Not everything in your feed will be valuable.  The trick is to create a feed that will provide you with some learning that you need each time you quickly dip into it.

It all comes down to who you follow.  So how do you decide that?

There are many ways to find interesting people to follow on Twitter.

One method is to look at the lists curated by other educators.

Here are some basic instructions on how to use lists to build your feed.

For further thinking, try accessing the link below.

How I Use Twitter Professionally by Brandon Grasley

Tom Whitby’s suggested list for educators.