Math Rocks Mission #2: Getting Started with Twitter

The other tool you’ll need this year is a Twitter account.

Ready to get started? In this mission, we’re going to guide you through setting up a Twitter account, help you decide your Twitter ID, and talk you through privacy settings.

If you already have a Twitter account, skip down to step 4.

If you’re new to Twitter, don’t fret, it’s a cinch! It will probably take you no more than 10 minutes! And that’s if you’re slow at typing.

If you really have no idea what Twitter is or how it works, watch this short video. It’s corny.

Here’s a link, just in case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4__htJ-IdU

We’re going to post the steps to sign up below, but we also want to share these eight videos with you. They are to-the-point and made by a teacher for teachers dipping their feet in.

1. Sign up for Twitter and get a username

To sign up:

• Go to http://twitter.com and find the Sign up box.
• Enter your name, email address, and a password
• Click Sign up
• On the next page, select a username. This is a unique identifier for you on Twitter. The one you want may not be available, so you might have to think of a few possibilities.
• Double check your name, email address, password, and username.
• Click Create my account. And you’re done! See, simple!

2. Say who you are

You will get to upload a picture that will represent you on Twitter. You can always change the picture later! You should definitely upload some image. The picture that you use gives everyone reading your tweets a super quick way to recognize you. You’ll have to make the decision whether to use a picture of yourself, or of something else. It doesn’t really matter.

You will also have to write a short description of yourself. Do this. Seriously, let me say that again, do this.

What is common to all of these is that they all talk about teaching math. That is super important…trust me. When deciding whether to follow someone on Twitter or not, most of us use this description to decide whether you’re worth following or a spambot Twitter account!

3. Decide your privacy settings

Here’s where you need to think about how public you want to be.

My recommendation is that you initially Twitter with public settings, so that whatever you tweet can be seen by anyone who goes to your Twitter page. That’s probably not quite the advice you expected. But when you start tweeting, you’re going to be finding people to follow, and people are going to be deciding whether to follow you back. And when someone is making the decision whether to follow you or not, they will often go to your page to see who you’re talking to and what you’re saying. If you’re not public, they can’t see anything. So my advice is to start out public and just remember to keep it professional.

However, after a while, once you’re gotten a core group, if you feel you want to go private and let your hair down a little, it’s really simple. You go to setting and click the checkbox:

Then anything you say after you go private is protected. That means only people that you approve to follow you can see your tweets. Of course, regardless of whether you are protected or not, you want to make sure that you’re being professional, especially since your followers can take screenshots of what you say and share those with anyone they want.

4. Follow, read, and tweet

• Follow @bstockus and @reginarocks
• Explore tweets in the #ElemMathChat hashtag.
• Tweet something. If you’re not sure what to tweet out, here are a couple of ideas:
  • What is one thing you are wondering about during our session today?
  • What is one thing you are looking forward to this school year – it doesn’t even have to be math related.
  • Share a link to an online resource that you like to use in your planning.

Be sure to include the hashtag #rrmathrocks in your tweet.

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From http://mathtwitterblogosphere.weebly.com/signing-up-with-twitter.html