Isolation is a Choice Educators Make: George Couros & The Twitter Factor

I have lost track of how many times I have heard George Couros speak at conferences--eight or ten seems about right. Today I heard him at the Ignite Inspire Innovation Conference in Stillwater, Minnesota. We've had him come speak at some of our past events in Minnetonka, too. I’m surprised I haven’t had a blog post about him until now, as I always enjoy hearing him present. George is an energetic, fun and passionate storyteller who can move and inspire an audience. He uses so many great images and video clips to get points across, and his jokes as a Canadian are a nice bonus. 

He always encourages the use of Twitter by educators to build a network outside their school with whom they can share ideas and best practices. This is something we encourage our own teachers to do in Minnetonka. I also encourage each of my online students who are mainly teachers around Minnesota working on their masters through the Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota program where I teach to do this as well. Although it's easy to sign up and start, it's not a practice I see all teachers follow through with in the long term. I've heard it said that it takes about ten weeks to form a habit, and I think using Twitter is no different. 

One of the more memorable stories I’ve heard George tell is what he is called 

the Twitter Factor (see A Higher Chance of Becoming Great? The “Twitter” Factor), in which he describes walking into a teacher‘s classroom and seeing all sorts of evidence that a teacher has a network outside of his or her school district. The  evidence is visible by some of the projects the teacher is doing with her/his students, from makerspaces to genius hours. One of the other points he makes in his talks and did so again today was that "isolation is now a choice educators make. If you want a world class education, you've got to look at what the rest of the world is doing." I agree. If you have been hesitant or have tried Twitter in the past but haven't found value in it yet, here a two tips I have to make it easier and more useful:

1. Use a free Twitter dashboard tool like HootSuite pictured. Rather than scrolling through an endless feed of random tweets of followers as well as ads, you can create columns organized by search keywords and hashtags you select, such as your school district, #edtech, #digcit, #ipaded, and more. You can then easily scroll through these sorted Tweets. Almost everyone I show this tool loves it and feels it is a much easier way to manage Twitter. Simply leave this webpage open as a tab in your browser and take a look at it as you have time. You can favorite, retweet, and compose new Tweets directly through the dashboard.
    
2. You can also turn on mobile alerts for colleagues/important connections so you receive a text every time s/he Tweets and don't miss out, without having to got to Twitter or a dashboard tool like HootSuite to see if they have posted anything. 

Other tips to add? Let me know via Twitter!