Part Five: Twitter for Educators…Organizing Your Tweets

This is the Fifth post in the twitter series…Twitter for Educators: The Only Guide You Will Need. Please see the end of this post for the series’ links.

Last time we talked about adding hashtags to make your tweets easier to find. You search for a hashtag(#) in the twitter search feature, as identified by the magnifying glass. 

You can find a number of posts related to that hashtag. For example #oilers:

This is a great browsing feature but it becomes time consuming to check all your hashtags this way. There is actually another way to view and save hashtags. I use Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a third party application that can used to organize your hashtags into their own columns or as Hootsuite refers to them as streams. 

Here is a screenshot of  three of my streams on my ipad.

The Benefits of Streams

1. Streams make it easier to participate in “chats”. (I will blog about this next)
2. Streams function as curator for likeminded conversations. Grouping conversations by hashtags into streams gives you a chance to see the big picture of what people are talking about over time.
3. Streams help to keep you informed about what is going on in your city. I set up streams to follow the city I am in #yeg, the traffic in my city #yegtraffic and what is going on in my school district #ecsd.
4. Streams add to your professional development. I have set up streams to follow conferences that I am attending  #ira2013 and not attending #ira2014. 
4. I set up streams that are aligned with my interests such as #writing or #nanowrimo.

Here is a helpful video to get you started.

Other Posts in the Series
Part 1: Getting Started With Twitter
Part 2: Responding To Your Twitter Feed
Part 3: Composing a Tweet
Part 4: Using Hashtags

Until Next Time,
Lit Maven Out!