Why do you tweet? Isn't it another time waster like Facebook?

A few years ago, shortly after I started on facebook, a friend sent me an invitation to try out twitter. I signed up and immediately did not understand it. I set the privacy so high that only my friend could see my tweets and I faithfully tweeted what I was doing 'teaching an engineer today', 'going to the hospital, high school and paper company today to teach', etc. It wasn't until I saw a presentation at an online conference presented by someone (the details completely escape me) that I finally 'got' it and so I opened up my tweets and started following people, Retweeting (I'm the queen of that) and dialoguing with educators. My whole life just expanded and I have learned so much from the network of people I have met through twitter. When I had the good fortune of attending the BESIG conference in Poland last November, I even got to meet and talk with several of my favorite twitter friends, which was great! If you are an educator and are interested in networking with like-minded teachers and receiving links of blog postings you would never find, I would highly suggest joining twitter.

Now to answer the question above--is it a time waster like facebook? My answer is that is can be if you don't discipline yourself, but it is so full of information that it might actually save you time. One good thing about twitter is that you can ask a question and eventually someone will come up with an answer. So, if you want to know what a good tool is for podcasting and tweet the question, you will get several answers and places to turn to from real live people as opposed to googling everything, which is what I tended to do before twitter (and still do at times). So, I would call twitter another avenue towards professional development if you use it right. (BTW, I love Facebook and used in moderation is a great way to network with friends...) Below, you will see a mosaic of many of my twitter friends!