Educators who are trying Bluesky say it feels a lot like Twitter in the early days: supportive, authentic, with a lot of ideas and resources being exchanged. — Image by macrovector on Freepik
Educators are connecting and sharing resources with each other on a new social media platform: Bluesky, an alternative to X (formerly Twitter).
Many educators relied on Twitter for years to connect with peers and build professional learning networks, as well as to get ideas about curriculum, assessments, and teaching approaches. But the platform has been on a down slope in recent years, critics say.
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk took over the company in 2022 and has enacted changes that he said would bolster free speech on the social media platform. Instead, critics argue that Musk has broken Twitter, saying it's no longer the online town square – the place to go to share ideas and discuss current events – because there are more bots and less content moderation leading to bigotry and more misinformation.
"Twitter used to be the place. It was easily the educators' community," said Eric Curts, a technology-integration specialist for the Stark-Portage Area Computer Consortium, which serves school districts in northeast Ohio. "After Twitter made so many changes, and a lot of educators left at that point, I started to wonder: Are we ever going to have that again? Will there no longer be a water cooler that we can all gather around and have these conversations?"
To try to fill that void, many educators are now experimenting with Bluesky for building and maintaining their professional learning networks. Though it might be too early to tell whether Bluesky will be the new go-to social media site for the education community, the numbers are rising. At least 2,700 educators had signed up for the app as of Dec 17, according to a Google Sheet collecting educators' usernames to share with peers.
Justin Cerenzia, the executive director of The Episcopal Academy's Center for Teaching and Learning in Newtown Square, Pa., said he started a Bluesky account about a year ago, because Twitter "was losing its lustre." So far, the "energy and momentum" of Bluesky feels a lot like " the halcyon days of Twitter," he said.
What is Bluesky?
Bluesky, which began as an internal project by then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has been around since 2019 but was invitation-only until February 2024. Since then, its user base – 20 million and counting – has grown exponentially. In the last month alone, fuelled by an exodus of users from X after the presidential election, more than 12 million users joined Bluesky, according to a post by its trust and safety team. (Bluesky is no longer associated with Twitter; it's an independent public benefit corporation.)
The platform looks a lot like Twitter, but some educators describe it as a cleaner version.
Users' feeds only show posts from people they follow, from newest to oldest posts. There's a "Discover" feed, which Bluesky says is customised for what the user likes to see, while still giving them a view into what's trending in the network. Users can also create their own custom feeds or follow feeds curated by other users. For instance, a Bluesky user created a feed called #EduSky so other users can follow conversations related to education and teaching.
Bluesky has features that other social media apps don't have that educators say have been helpful in building or rebuilding their networks.
The "starter pack" is one example: A user can create a list of feeds and people to follow and share that with their network. For instance, Curts created a starter pack of people who are attending the Future of Education Technology Conference in January so they can all connect beforehand.
"(Starter packs) just make it so easy to get started in the system," Curts said. "That's one of the toughest things – you come to a new place, you're like, OK, how do I connect with people? That has really helped a lot."
In the future, educators said they'd like to see other key features to enhance their experience, such as the edit button (to revise or correct posts) and a way to schedule posts.
How educators are using Bluesky
Curts, who was part of the invite-only crowd on Bluesky, has had an account on the social media site for more than a year. In the beginning, he said, it was not an active site for educators. But he said more educators have been jumping on board in recent months.
"There's enough people there that we're seeing that critical mass," Curts said. "We're seeing educators being very active."
For Curts, one measure of that is the resurfacing of conversations that are similar to Twitter chats on Bluesky, he said. Back when there was more educator engagement on Twitter, there would be weekly chats on different topics that educators could participate in.
"Those have now started resurfacing on Bluesky," Curts said. "That's sort of the litmus test that indicates educators are here now. People are showing up and they're chatting, they're connecting, and that's fantastic."
Cerenzia said it's nice to have another place to connect with researchers, teachers, and other people who work in education to learn new things he can integrate into his work in the classroom.
Zachary Flower, who just started teaching computer science this school year for Warren Tech in Lakewood, Colo. after leaving the tech industry, said he's looking forward to maintaining his industry connections on Bluesky.
"The biggest challenge" for career and technical educators is "maintaining those connections with industry," said Flower, a former software engineer. "I realised I need to continue to build whatever platform I can to find opportunities for my students."
Flower also wants to use Bluesky to connect with other computer science educators to learn from them.
"I'm comfortable with the technical part. I'm comfortable with the career part," he said. "Teaching is very new, so I'm trying to kind of connect with as many computer science educators as I can to learn."
Will educators ever get the Twitter 2.0 they're nostalgic for?
Many educators have been looking for X alternatives to build professional learning networks and connect with other educators. A handful of alternatives, such as Mastodon and Threads, have cropped up in recent years, but none of them has captured nearly as much attention as Twitter, educators said.
Educators who are trying Bluesky say it feels a lot like Twitter in the early days: supportive, authentic, with a lot of ideas and resources being exchanged. (Some felt the same way when Meta released its Twitter alternative, Threads, but now more than a year since it launched, educators say the platform never really took off with their professional learning networks.)
Jeffrey Carpenter, a professor of education at Elon University who studies educators' use of social media, says he's seen a lot of "nostalgia for that time" when Twitter was the main place for the K-12 community to gather. But he says he's not sure that will be "recreated" in any of the platforms that have cropped up.
"People just don't use one platform anymore," Carpenter said.
In fact, Curts, Cerenzia, and a lot of educators are still cross-posting—posting the same things—on all their social media accounts to reach as many of their networks as possible.
It's not necessarily a bad thing that there won't be just one space for educators to gather, Carpenter said.
"There are a lot of niches in education," he said.
Now, teachers use different platforms for different purposes. They might belong to a private Facebook group and also post on a more public social media account, whether that's TikTok or Instagram or Bluesky; they might have a space they go to that is specific to the content or grade level they teach, and then another space for broader education conversations.
It's also possible that teachers are now more hesitant to go all in on one platform because of what happened with X, Carpenter said. It took a lot of time to build up the professional learning networks they had there, and they might not think it's worth it to reestablish that on a platform that may or may not work out.
Curts said he hopes educators eventually pick Bluesky as their go-to social media app. That's where he "camps out," he said. "I'm getting good connections with people and having good conversations there."
But if Bluesky doesn't work out, Curts has created an email distribution list with his professional learning network so that he doesn't have to worry about losing what he's spent years building.
"What if another social media place that I invest heavily in disappears? I want an easy way that I can always communicate with people who care about what I'm doing," he said. – Education Week, Bethesda, Md./Tribune News Service
