Twitter is all about sharing and that’s why we built Tweet displaying right into TrilbyTV. We know schools and teachers love posting their daily updates on Twitter and it’s a great way of engaging with parents and the wider community.
As a tool Twitter can be an unwieldy beast when you first look. Lots of messages flying past with content being posted every second – it can be overwhelming to find people and information in the stream. A hashtag (keyword prefixed with a #, e.g #bakeoff) is used as a way of tagging information a bit like you might save a PowerPoint with ‘KS2’ or ‘Yr6’ in the title to help you find it later. When someone posts a message to twitter they decide on the hashtags to use and through a general consensus, some hashtags become popular and get adopted by more people over time.
Get started by signing up to twitter and do a search for some popular hashtags…
- #edtech – the catch all hashtag for anything with an EDucation TECHnology bias.
- #ipaded – more of an iPad in education focus to these tweets
- #SLTchat – things Senior Leadership need to know about
- #eyfs – for some great early years inspiration
- #mantleoftheexpert – young people encouraged to take on the expert role in many subjects
As well as Hashtags you can ‘follow’ individuals and companies, so you open Twitter you will see everything they have posted in your home stream. This is great for knowing the latest information from an individual or organisation. It’s quite likely that your school will have a Twitter feed, you can usually find it on the website, and the username will look like @SchoolName. Just click on the @SchoolName link and then click Follow – that’s it!
Twitter has over millions of users so you won’t want to follow them all, but you might want to follow these folks for some great education tips and tricks…
- Claire Jones @AsstHead_Jones Layton Primary School
- Marc Withsey @marcwithersey Early Years Teacher, Apple RTC Nottingham Manager
- @TechTeachGoals class based teachers sharing hints & tips
- @TeacherToolkit Classroom Ideas & Teacher Training
- Paul Tullock @MrTullockE-learning & computing lead @RichardsonDees
- Aidan Severs@thatboycanteach Primary Lead Practitioner for a MAT
- @PEgeeks A collaboration of ideas and resources from PE teachers
The twitter sharing wall at Layton Primary
Remember to share what you find with colleagues. The amazing Twitter CPD display at Layton Primary School is a great example of ‘offline’ sharing and highlights some leading educators as well as popular tweets that other staff have filtered and found to be useful (and retweeted).
If you have a digital display screen or TV in your staff room (many already do, usually playing BBC News 24) consider which tweets you could show to promote staff CPD alongside your students work instead. TrilbyTV allows you to add a Twitter @username and choose how many recent tweets to show. We have seen school staffroom screens showing tweets from @tes and @DFE. We’ve made it very easy to add Twitter feeds to your TrilbyTV, but for more help take a look at the support article here.
And of course remember to follow us @TrilbyTV!
TrilbyTV is available on a 30 day free trial so you can see in your school how great full screen tweets look. We will even come and install a free trial player device if you don’t have one – fill out the form here and we’ll be round in a jiffy to #SwitchOnYourSignage