Into the Driver's Seat

By Daniel Edwards

"Twitter is a fantastic resource for educators around the world and I am indebted to past, present and future folk willing to contribute, inform and debate. The common goal is to enhance learning for our students and educators on twitter are so pro-active it makes you proud to be amongst them (sobbing starts again).

I look forward to the next 10 stages."

Retweets, you have heard about them, you know what they are but you aren’t gettin’ them.

For some reason you just can’t seem to get the engagement you are seeking, desiring and yearning for in social media and Twitter.

You may be new to Twitter and simply don’t know what the heck you are doing, how to get a retweet or why the retweets even matter. This post won’t teach you what Twitter is but provides good tips for tweetable content which you need regardless if you know what you’re doing or not (joking).

Or you may be a Twitter and social media veteran who just wants to boost your ego, increase your Klout score or simply show off for Grandpa this weekend how popular you are on the social waves?...

Report by Julie McCulloch, Ewan McIntosh and Tom Barrett

1: How are teachers and other educators currently using social media to aid their professional development, and what do they and their students gain from it?

2: What evidence is there for the benefits of peer-to-peer CPD, and for using social media in this way?

3: What can teaching learn from how business uses social media to drive improvement?

After creating content -- whether it's a blog post, an ebook, a webinar, or a video -- it's important to promote that content through social media channels.

And when you do promote that content in social media, you cross your fingers that it generates a ton of shares, tweets, and interaction. For the sake of Twitter, if you follow a few simple best practices, more people are likely to retweet and spread the distribution of your content, giving it a much broader reach and a better opportunity to get found by a new audience of prospective customers beyond your direct followers. Marketers should know how to retweet the right way, but it's also critical for them to learn how to get others to retweet their content, too.

11 Tips for Getting People to Retweet Your Content...

While Facebook and Google Plus social continue to push new features live, battling themselves over who can dominate the market, Twitter remains the most powerful driver of traffic to my site.

Ever since the t.co shortener was introduced, I can see it showing up at the top of my referrers at any given day.

This is very powerful and also quite reassuring. Continuing to improve and work on my Twitter performance has paid off greatly so far.

Excellent in depth article on Twitter as professional learning source - from Brisbane Catholic Education’s Information and Resourcing Centre. "The power of Twitter is that it places the teacher at the centre of a network to which all parts are equally accessible. Teachers who use Twitter can access not only traditional sources of information, but also the expertise and advice of internationally renowned experts from across many fields within and beyond education. Research has identified six ‘common patterns of participation’ for users of Twitter..."