Last October 3, Telecentre.org Foundation (TCF) conducted a 'Free Online Twitter Training for Newbies' in an effort to help community members learn about the basics and important aspects of tweeting.
One of the major objectives behind this initiative is to provide community members practical experience in using Twitter and thereby create awareness and appreciation of it as an important tool for networking and information sharing.
In order to enable community members from around the world to participate, TCF conducted the training in 3 batches to cover 3 different time zones, with each session lasting for about one and a half hours.
The training was carried out via Twitter itself, and participants were guided through the first steps of tweeting such as distinguishing between home and profile pages; understanding the difference between friends and followers; composing tweets; learning about retweets, hashtags and mentions; distinguishing replies from direct messages; adding links and images to tweets as well as shortening links.
Prior to the training, participants were provided with notes to help them understand what Twitter is, its uses and benefits
Overall, the training was well-received by the participants who appreciated that it was conducted on the Twitter platform itself and that TCF’s Regional Community Coordinators were on hand to guide them along especially during the exercises. They also expressed gratitude to TCF for organizing the training.
The online training was also held as a preparatory event for the staging of TweetIT!, a Twitter-based question-and-answer contest for members of TCF’s online community, that will be held on October 23 (please continue to watch this space for further announcement).

Special thanks to everyone who participated in the training and to Amos Ochieng who designed our Twitter training and TweetIT! logo.