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A few weeks ago, I attended a Twitter workshop for teachers offered by my board.  I'd been meaning to check Twitter out for a while, but was a little worried about the time-suck it might create for me, given the amount of time I already spend on facebook and teacher-blog-surfing.  But I figured this would be a good, pointed way to expose myself to the PLN aspect of Twitter.  A week or two later, I was very surprised to be attending a family of schools PD event, being addressed by our Director of Education, with a large screen next to him showing the twitter feed for the day!

So, I've jumped on the Twitter bandwagon... but have limited the people I follow to people of professional interest to me!  (I admit, I was following Oprah for a tiny bit, until I realized there was NO WAY these tweets were actually being written by her, so why bother?!)

In case you're toying with the idea yourself, here's a little bit of information to help you make the transition.

Twitter Symbols

The first thing that you need to know is that the @ (at symbol) before someone's name shows their "Twitter handle"... think of it kind of like addressing people by their email address, although it would be the part of their email address that comes before the at symbol, rather than after it.

And the number sign, followed by a series of letters that may or may not look like a word is called a hashtag.   That acts like a keyword to help people to find topics of interest to them amongst the vast number of "conversations" taking place on Twitter at any time.


List of Important Hashtags for Teachers 

#frimm (french immersion)
#frenchimm
#langchat (language chat)
#fle (francais langue etrangere)
#flteach (foreign language teaching)
#french (also get lots on non-teaching tweets though)
#aimlang (AIM - Accelerated Integrated Methodology approach to language teaching)
#ClavEd  (French Speakers – Wednesdays at 12h(EST) 13h(ATL) 18h(Paris))
#actfl21c (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 21st century)
#actfl ((American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages)
#biliteracy (bilingual literacy)
#mfl (modern foreign languages)
#bilingual
#CanEd (Canadian education) ** Use this one with some caution... I found it also brings up some topics unrelated to education and not for the faint of heart! ** Maybe try CdnEd instead...?
#mfltwitterati (UK modern foreign language twitter chat)


Here is a general education hashtag list on Edudemic as well, although some specialty topics are not included there. I also found this list of Canada's top edu-tweeters which might interest you.

Are there others I'm missing?  Please use the Contact page to let me know and I'll gladly update this list as it pertains to those of us teaching French in Ontario/Canada.