Recently I decided to start running some more informal relaxed training sessions at school for staff. Not the sort of official ‘boring’ ones where staff have to learn how to do mail merge but fun ones like YouTube and Twitter.
So for this week’s Twitter sessions I set out with an easy aim – I wasn’t trying to convert teachers into using Twitter extensively but instead just show them how it worked and some of the benefits it can bring. I wrote the PowerPoint which is attached to the blog as the basis for the lesson and it proved to be reasonably successful as a resource. I sometimes write PowerPoints which don’t end up getting used for one reason or another so it felt good to use one properly. Of course it could be improved even further but at least I’ve got one I can revisit.
As for the training itself that went reasonably well. I had 4 in one session and a single person in another session which for my school is a good turnout. All staff bar one either had a Twitter account or set one up in the session. We went through most of the basic features including @replies, DM’s, Hashtags and favourites. Some staff asked some pretty specific questions which showed that they were taking it all in.
None of the staff since the sessions have tweeted again but I’m not concerned about that. I at least managed to educate people about Twitter so that it is something which is less ‘alien’ to them and therefore I think it will increase the chance of them possibly getting into Twitter at the right time.
Till next time …
ps: Don’t you just love alliteration?
