Use Twitter for Professional Development

Nowadays, twitter become one of the most popular social network that people use in daily life, but how can we use twitter to develop our profession also heated discussed by people. If you have been using twitter for quite a long time, you definitely notice that people tweet whatever that want. There are no rules for tweet something or retweet something. They do it because they want to not because they need to. If your followers are like this type, you were tired of reading spams and want to skip them and finally, you might loose interest in follow them.
10 Twitter Mistakes You Should Avoid tells you how to use twitter appropriately not only in professional development, but also in daily life. The first principle is that avoid over-tweeting

if someone over-tweeting, the whole homepage would be filled up by them, which bothers others a lot especially you tweet something useless and meaningless. Other mistakes are: follow Friday perversion, celebrity insulting, RIP for someone famous, retweet every compliment, tweet about food, etc. In China, we have Weibo, which is like Twitter in America. Some of my followers tweet about food everyday, even though I am tired of that, I would bother sometime because you have to say good words in your compliment. 

If you want to use Twitter for professional development, this article 10 WAYS Teachers Can Use Twitter for Professional Development provides you some ways. Create a strong profile page, use hashtags

and share what you read are mentioned in this article. After I read this article, I think I really did a bad job in using twitter for professional development. I don't have a strong profile, I did not filled up my bio as well. But I really think that Twitter can help educators a lot in future. If you use hashtags, you can find topics that interesting you in the whole twitter and join them to discuss the topic. Also, your questions might be answered by others around the world, which means you get opinions from around the world. Share what you read on twitter also help you develop your career. Say I read books or articles about how to teach refugees and I tweet my reviews, my followers read it and might also give comments on my tweet. What's more, someone who read the same article or book would provide their review on comments as well. By this way, you actually "communicate" with others about your thoughts. You can improve yourself and reflect what you do in class in twitter if you use it as a teaching diary.