Ei-iE

Those who visited the World Teachers’ Day site this year will have noticed that for the first time we integrated a Twitter board on its front page.

“What’s Twitter?” those who are not familiar with the odd term may ask. In short, Twitter is a worldwide micro-blog that has transformed the way social networking sites operate, even threatening the hegemony of Web 2.0 giant, Facebook. On Twitter, users can post a maximum of 140 characters in a “tweet” about any topic under the sun. Users have created a whole new vocabulary by changing the verb into a noun (someone “tweets” by posting a “tweet”) and introducing the strange word “twitterer” (someone who uses the social networking site). Site visitors who “follow” you will see your tweets on their Twitter page. If they like your tweet they may choose to “retweet” it by copying the whole tweet preceded by an “RT”. If you’re tweeting to a fellow “twitterer” you post your tweet preceded by an “@” then his or her user name, like “@eduint” – which is Education International’s name on Twitter. If you are tweeting about a particular subject, you may “tag” the end of your tweet with a hashtag followed by the topic, for example “#michaeljackson” or “#roses”. Conversely you can search for all the tweets about a particular topic by typing a hashtag followed by the topic in the search box on your Twitter page. Because Twitter is such a small and simple site, it is extremely easy to integrate its functions into your own websites and Twitter applications have been developed for all sorts of mobile devices making it possible to tweet anywhere you go. Hence its simplicity and portability made its popularity soar sky-high in the past 2 years. This year, we wanted to provide a service to teachers and their unions who make use of Twitter to chat about World Teachers’ Day. Using the hashtag #wtd2009, we posted a live Twitter board featuring only tweets tagged with the topic. It proved to be an instant hit! On 5 October, more than 220 tweets were posted – ranging from best wishes to one’s favourite teacher to links to blog articles about the passion of teaching. Through Twitter, we were able to befriend so many teachers who are passionate about their profession and listen to their day-to-day concerns. Much to our surprise, there are numerous teachers out there who share their teaching methodologies and exchange teaching materials – providing support to one another – all through Twitter! Read all the tweets about World Teachers’ Day: twitter.com/#search?q=%23wtd2009. Follow EI on Twitter: twitter.com/eduint.