Twitter tags

Editor's Notes

• #2: This screencast is brought to you by Enhancingteaching.com. The topic that we are talking about today is one of the features of Twitter – the specific feature in question is “Twitter tags”.This is a short screencast to introduce the concept of twitter tags and highlight a few tags that are relevant to education.
• #3: In twitter you can follow users and here what they are saying on twitter. However there are millions of people using twitter and you can’t practically follow them all. A great option available to you though is following a topic rather than a person (click)
• #4: Following topics is done through a feature referred to as hashtag (click) . So what is a hashtag? (Click)
• #5: Everybody is familar with luggage tags, price tags, and dog tags. In Twitter we have hash tags. A hashtag is a way to unite global Tweets around some particular topic. Basically, these are tags that that help those who seek similar content discover your Tweets. According to the official source:Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.Read more at http://www.searchenginejournal.com/twitter-hashtags/9419/#m6Svp6JSfbHhkGzP.99
• #6: you can follow a hashtag – essentially hoping they will signpost you in the right direction. A tag can be a word or number or combination of both. Anybody can make a tag, there is not a limited number of elite twitter users Let’s take a a look at two examples
• #7: The first tweet has several hashtags. I received this tweet because I “follow “my Math cloud” He talks about numerous things in his tweets, most of which interest me. I decided to retweet his message to my followers as it is very relevant to science teaching. Acknowledging the fact that there are loads of science teachers in Ireland on Twitter that do not follow me instead of simply retweeting his message I quoted it and added the hashtagedchatie. This means it will turn up in anybodys tweet stream if the search the term #edchatie, even if they don’t follow me personally on Twitter. Edchatie for those that don’t already know it is a hashtag used by teachers in Ireland that are tweeter users and interested in using technology in their classroom. It is a hashtag definitely worth followingThe second example (Click) is a tweet where I wanted to promote a conference and I decided to include the conference hashtag. At the end of the tutorial I provide links to more resources on how to use hashtags if you are organising a conference but for now I will just start with two scenarios (clcik)
• #8: Whether you are attending in person or virtually twitter will give you direct contact with other conference participants who are on twitter.
• #9: In this diagram conference delagates are represented by represnted by the different coloured men surfing mice, with their titter followers not attending the conference but following the conference through their Representative attending the conference. My Pink is tweeting to his followers and Mr Blue to his etc. However if each of the participants use the conference hashtag in their tweets, all four groups represented in this diagram are instantly connected.
• #10: I mentioned Edchatie earlier. It is the tag I follow the closest on Twitter and is something that I could not recommend highly enough. Led by the incredible Fred Boss from the NCTE the knowledge that emanates from this group is incredible
• #11: Here are some quotes from 2 edchatie users
• #12: You are by no stretch of the imagination limited to just edchatie – here are several tags that you may find interesting, the subtle placing of edchatie twice on this screen is no accident
• #13: OK So where to next
• #14: Thank you for your takign the time to listen to this presentation and for similar hints and tips please visit my blog