ABSTRACT
Twitter is a popular social networking service that many teachers and school leaders use to connect with other educators. Specific to professional development and learning (PDL), school leaders in high-needs schools prefer Twitter to other social media and networking services. Twitter’s conversational nature, ease of use, brevity of individual tweets, archival feature via hashtags, and the widespread availability of education chats are several advantages of its use for PDL. School leaders can also use Twitter to overcome some of the common obstacles to traditional forms of PDL—time, money, and teacher absence from the classroom—to lead with continuous growth and development of staff as a priority. Upon consideration of the successes, pitfalls, and future value of Twitter for PDL, school leaders in high-needs schools can use these obstacles as opportunities to implement a Twitter-for-PDL initiative. Recommendations for implementation of Twitter-for-PDL initiatives in high-needs schools include: (a) model use, (b) introduce staff, (c) encourage use for personal learning, (d) moderate staff use, and (e) acknowledge staff use.
