Everyone seems to be talking about using Twitter as a professional development tool. A key part of that is following the right people, but how do we find interesting educators to follow?

The challenge of producing lists of educators to follow on Twitter is that any selection is crucially much more to do with the reader's own interests as an educator than some definitive standard of the great and the good. So this post will not try to tell you who you ought to follow – though I will flag up some educators who will hopefully be of interest to all – but rather, how to go about tracking down the educators that you would wish to hear from.

A quick Google search will reveal that there are lots of existing suggested lists of teachers and other educators who are active on Twitter. One such is Pooky Hesmondhalgh's 20 Top Educational Tweeters, and a fine list it is too. I certainly found several of the people who I follow on it. But it's probably only useful if, like Pooky and me, you live in the UK and share her particular interests in educational politics, the use of technology and the like. All such lists of educational Tweeters inevitably come with this catch-22: they are by nature subjective, rather than objective.

Given that Twitter is about crowd-sourcing, surely one obvious approach to assembling a list of educational Tweeters is to set up a self-registration site, where educators share Twitter names and interests? All that's required is an online registration form for a database that teachers can use to fill in their own details and areas of interest. This has been tried by teachers, probably most notably by blogger Liz B Davis back in 2008 when she set up a shared Google spreadsheet (with its own separate entry form) to allow teachers to record their interests and link up. This was made even more accessible when it was taken by Patricia Donaghy as a basis for her International Edutwitters Directory. This added a graphical front-end to the data to make it easier to track down educators with shared interests. However, it also revealed the limitations, with fewer than 2,000 educators having taken the time to register; when you start narrowing the list by location, subject or other interests you will probably find that the number of matches to your own interests are relatively few.

So, are there more productive routes to tracking down educational Tweeters? Specialist educational social networking sites, though they do not provide a database-driven approach (or maybe because they don't!) offer access to many more educational Tweeters that may share your particular passion. For example, the Ning at The Educators PLN (the personal learning network for educators) has over 11,000 educator members. Many of them join special-interest groups such as 'Canadian Teachers' or the 'Art Network', which means that you can easily track down a dozen or more like-minded individuals whose educational interests match your own. And, for most, Twitter is the preferred regular communication channel so you can hook up and follow them quite easily.

Educational blogs are another good source of suitable Tweeters, and actually were a starting point for many of the most influential and widely-followed educators on Twitter. Probably the best known of all is @CoolCatTeacher, Vicki Davis, who started off her educator blog in 2005, extended her social networking into other tools including Twitter, and has now amassed over 30,000 Twitter followers. Vicki, from Camilla in Georgia, describes herself as a self-professed 'full time teacher, blogger, Tweeter, Tumblr, Facebook-er, and passionate advocate for inspiring and informing teachers, parents, and professionals about how to reach this generation of learners' (Cool Cat Teacher Blog: About Me). Vicki herself follows over 7,000 people on Twitter; her list of friends, and indeed her list of followers, offers a rich source that you can explore for candidates for your own follow list!

Undoubtedly, Vicki attracted many of her educator followers by winning educational blogging awards in 2008 and 2009, and these awards websites offer you another good route to people to follow on Twitter. The 2011 Edublogs Awards included nominations for the best individual educational Tweeter of 2011, so the list of nominees not only offers an up-to-date selection of educational Tweeters, but also one that you know only includes those who other educators enjoy and endorse. Many of my own key educational Twitter sources appeared on this list of nominees and I really do recommend that you explore it for inspiration.

Talking of lists, we can see yet another excellent way to track down educators to follow on Twitter by exploring Vicki's Twitter pages more thoroughly. Vicki not only follows educators, she is well-organised and sorts them into her own Twitter lists. Selecting 'Lists' on her Twitter page (as shown on the above screenshot) offers you a pull-down menu where you can see Vicki's list categories. These include not only role-related lists (e.g. teachers, principals), but also topic-related ones (e.g. flat classroom, mobile learning) – another wonderful route to building your own group to follow.

There are a lot of tools that have sprung up around Twitter and you probably won't be surprised that among these are tools to help you choose who to follow. Being dynamic, these have now tended to replace the brave listing efforts of those attempting to create directories and databases early in the life of Twitter. One such tool is wefollow, which allows you to search, using tags, for the most influential Tweeters in any category or location. Put 'teacher' into the search box and up pops the page of most influential teachers, with Vicki Davis at the top of the list. Using 'educator' instead of 'teacher' on wefollow also offers us some great educational Tweeters to follow. Furthermore, wefollow allows you to find those with the most followers, though this seems to tell us more about people's enthusiasm for collecting followers rather than Tweeting with colleagues!

The earlier 'directory' idea hasn't entirely disappeared, however, and some tools such as Twellow still offer this approach to help track down teachers by category. There are over 50,000 educators on Twellow, but many of the Twitter handles (IDs) filed here are clearly commercially orientated and somewhat broad in their concept of 'educator'. As one narrows down through the categories, for example to K-12 teachers, the numbers become far fewer.

So what was my own favourite route to deciding who to follow? Obviously I used all the above techniques, but undoubtedly the most rewarding for me was to stop and think: 'Who are the educators I know on Twitter who have taught or inspired me?' For example, I was originally introduced to Twitter in 2007 by Ewan McIntosh (@ewanmcintosh) at a workshop at one of Alan November's (@globalearner) wonderful Boston conferences on Building Learning Communities. So, there are two people whose lists of friends and followers I immediately explored to find educators to follow. Similarly, the influential @stephenheppell provided more friends and followers. As my own Twitter stream started flowing, there were some people I found that I tuned in to and looked out for. I therefore spent time looking at their friend lists to find like-minded people to add to my own.

In summary, the best source of Twitter educators for me is always the friend lists of the educators who I know and admire. Not all of them are famous, or even educational celebrities, but as Vicki Davis has shown, the best and most useful educational Tweeters are not always those who are in important roles or influential positions, but those who chime with our own ideas, or who extend and challenge our own educational thinking.

Tony Parkin (@tonyparkin), for Promethean Planet (@planet_tweets)

References

• Cool Cat Teacher Blog: About Me
• The Creative Education Blog: 20 Top Educational Tweeters
• The Edublog Awards Blog: Best Individual Tweeter 2011
• The Educators PLN
• The Power of Educational Technology: A Spreadsheet of Educational Technology
• Twellow
• wefollow

Enjoyed this? You may also like Using Education Hashtags on Twitter, by Tony Parkin.

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