So, you went to your first (or fifth) Edcamp. Give yourself a pat on the back. No, seriously, do it! You have most likely given up a Saturday or another chunk of what little free time you have. You spent it with other educators who are as dedicated as you, who want to do what is best for our students and colleagues.

Hopefully, you left inspired and ready to take on the world. You may have left with new ideas, new apps, or even a door prize. Most importantly, you left with new educators to add to your PLN. If you are not familiar with a PLN many, more qualified, people have written about them and I link to them here, Edutopia and George Couros.

You have probably heard before that one of the best ways to start growing your PLN is through Twitter. I absolutely agree! But, as a new user you may become overwhelmed with how many people you are following and how hard it is to keep up with your feed. I have found that Twitter Lists are the best way to solve this problem. With a list it is easy to keep track of where you met people, follow conversations about certain topics, and quickly check the feeds of your favorite people.

I have found Twitter Lists to be great, but hard to set up. Finding who I wanted to add to each list and clicking several buttons to add them to the list always felt like there were too many steps. Fortunately, I found a solution that is working for me and hopefully will for you also. The caveat is that you have to be using Google Chrome and if you aren’t that is a whole different post.

In the Google Chrome Store search for List Builder for Twitter and install it. After you do that and are signed into Twitter you will have a box in the upper right of your screen. With this box you can automatically select every tweet on a page or select individuals to add to a list that you created. Awesome, right? It gets better. Let’s say I didn’t write anyone’s Twitter names down at the last Edcamp I went to and want to add them to a list. I just search the hashtag associated with that EdCamp, or any other event or chat, and add the people who posted with that hashtag. I have found that scrolling down the page before I add people to the list gives me more people.

Do you have another way to manage Twitter Lists? Please, share with us.