Tweetdeck--So Simple and So Helpful

We had a coaching meeting in our district on Friday. Our agenda included sharing successes, as well as sharing challenges. We were also asked to bring an artifact of a tool that we had been using. I brought the chartbook where I keep all of my mentor charts for teachers, and I shared that. But, when one of the technology specialist shared an app for reading QR codes, it occurred to me that I should have shared my tweetdeck. While twitter has become my go-to resource for inspiration about any aspect of education, tweetdeck is incredible for helping to manage it. Even as I shared it, there was a series of tweets on my #educoach column about helping literacy coaches (from Choice Literacy, linked here), prompts to use when coaching teachers from Shira Leibowitz, an article about setting goals with teachers from Jim Knight,  and a wonderful graphic of a pencil representing technology integration:

A screen shot of my tweetdeck looks something like this:

I can slide the columns up and down to see more and less recent tweets, but I can also adjust the order that my columns are in, which I've explained later in the post.

In order to use tweetdeck, go to tweetdeck.com and then hit the "sign in on the web" button:

From there, you can use your twitter id and password and then customize the screen to be the chats and hashtags that you want to follow. When there's a chat or hashtag that you want to follow, add that column and you see all of the activity about it right there in one place. You can tweet right from tweetdeck, adding an image if you care to.  Sometimes, when I am participating in a chat, I put the notifications column next to the chat, so that I can pay attention to the comments back to me. You can move the columns around by using the grey column on the far left, adjusting to have various ones side by side in what ever way helps you to pay attention to the incoming information. 

If you are already on twitter, I highly recommend tweetdeck--add a few columns with some favorite hashtags. Given the fact that you are reading this post, I recommend #tcrwp, #twtblog, #educoach, #engchat, and #elachat, but sky's the limit--there's no shortage of information out there. 

So much to learn!