To follow up on the popularity of my blog post Seven Ways to Find Teachers on Twitter I thought that I should share the news of a new service that makes it quite easy to find educators on Twitter. We Follow was launched over the weekend by Digg founder Kevin Rose. We Follow is a user powered Twitter directory. You can add yourself to the education directory by simply sending a tweet to @wefollow followed by the hashtag “education.” For example I added myself to the education directory this way @wefollow #education. I also added myself to the technology and blogger directories using the same method.
We Follow ranks every Twitter user in each directory by the number of followers that they have. For example, in the education directory I’m currently ranked 28th with 1,216 followers and Kevin Jarrett is ranked 14th with 2071 followers. By the way, if you’re not following Kevin, you should be. He shares a lot of great thoughts about elementary education and technology in the elementary classroom. As it is a user generated directory, there may be some people in the directory that aren’t actually academic educators, but have chosen to use that hashtag anyway.
Overall, We Follow may be the easiest way to find teachers on Twitter. If you would like to follow me on Twitter, my user name is rmbyrne.
If you’re not sure what Twitter can do for you, please take a moment to read the introduction to my post Seven Ways to Find Teachers on Twitter. If you’re new to Twitter, you may want to start developing your network with these ten people.
Finally, for an excellent video introduction to Twitter, please watch this video from Common Craft.