Twitter and the PLN...

I come to blogging because of twitter. Many teachers on twitter have blogs and it is a very good way to share practice that cannot be described through 140 characters.

I had a twitter account for a long time before I started tweeting, but quickly got into it once I started following the right people. Now I follow anyone who is a teacher or trainee teacher and a lot of people who are related to education. Mostly I like to follow those in the UK, but there are a few very inspiring North American teachers who have twitter accounts too.

I have become good at filtering through the thousands of tweets in my twitter stream per day, usually only looking back over the past hundred or so. I can spot the avatar of the people and organisations that I am most interested in and tune into their tweets, gradually building up the people I follow has helped with this.

I believe that it took me a while to get into using twitter because I didn't know who to follow. I was trying to use the twitter recommendations and only found NASA and BBC news. Finding real people is much better.

So if I could only follow 10s of people instead of 1000, who would I follow?

@Bio_Joe
@Lethandrel
@cleverfiend
@Mr_D_Cheng
@NeedhamL56
@teachingofsci
@ViciaScience
@morphosaurus
@agittner
@asober
@57mason
@niamhirl
@maz_blaze90
@damianainscough
@DrDav
@Biolady99
@AnthHard
@deejbee
@cardiffscience
@Mallrat_uk
@123anatomy
@doc_gnome
@racheleppy

Would be my list of real people. They are all scientists and contribute to #asechat on Monday evenings.


There are another group who are ICT based and very much into blogging with their students. @ICTEvangelist, @ianaddison and @fraserspeirs would be a starting point.


There are also organisations on twitter. This is the part that I find the most useful: following what their latest ideas are and keeping up to date with the data being pushed to me rather than me having to look for it.

@STEMclubs
@Future_Morph
@RSC_EiC
@imascientist
@ScienceWeekUK
@TESScience
@GCSE_Science
@SAPS_News
@ScienceVoice
@ThePhySoc
@SciTeachJC
@scicast
@SexEdUKation
@planetscience
@OxfordEdScience
@ARKive

There are others, such as the department for education and the schools network. One can even follow Toby Young.

However, any science teacher new to twitter who starts with these lists should be able to build their "personal learning network" up quite easily from these starting points, and have no trouble in learning or re-learning something related to science education.