School 2.0 in South Africa

<—Back to main twitter un-workshop page 

Hopefully by now you are convinced of the amazing sharing and learning opportunities that twitter offers. This edu-twittering can however, result in a virus like condition that I like to call Compulsive Obsessive Information Stream Addiction (COISA). You will know that you are suffering from COISA if you start talking  in acronyms/hashtags, constantly or permanently check your twitter updates on your phone/mobile device/laptop/desktop ass well as colleagues’ computers, and have anxiety attacks if you, for whatever reason, not have internet connectivity. This is not a healthy situation (ask @lady_chocoholic) and edutwits can panic about missing out on resources or the latest cutting edge information.

In an era of information tsunamis, we need to learn how to manage the overload and we need to educate our students on how to do the same. The first thing you need to tell yourself is that the good stuff will be fished out out the edutwitter-stream and chucked back by someone else filtering (retweeting) it. Fortunately there are also quite a few tools at our disposal to assist us in consuming, filtering and organising the information shared on twitter (and other social media platforms). These tools have the following in common:

• They act as curation tools by filtering resources according to topics and interest areas.
• They make it easy to share (retweet) resources back into your twitter stream
• They auto credit the resource discovery to the person who first shared it.

As these tools are third party tools you can start using them straight away by signing in using your twitter (or Facebook) username and password. We will look at 3 tools to make your life easier and you can also encourage your students to use these tools for class projects.

Paper.li (www.paper.li)

This amazing curation tool actually works across quite a few social media platforms and can publish Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or any web content into a handy online personalized daily newspaper. It monitors your content sources to update your paper automatically. For our purposes we will just use twitter as a source, but you are welcome to include your Facebook, or any other source  updates as well. You can choose whose tweets it should include. If you tell it to turn those whom you follow’s tweets into a newspaper, it will collect only the most important tweets and filter out the background noise. You can further filter the information included in your newspaper using hashtags or keywords.

I have created a how-to document for your use here (you can download it from here

More tools to manage your twitter resources and information:

Summify (www.summify.com)

I have found this tool very handy as it sifts through your social media platforms (twitter, Facebook, blogs, wikis, Google+…) and present you with a daily e-mail. I always receive, magically, only the most important news bits (top 10 articles) in a quick scannable and visual e-newspaper. It creates a beautiful daily summary of the most relevant news from your social networks, and delivers it to you by email, web or mobile.

What is Summify? from Summify on Vimeo.

Twylah (www.twylah.com)

I am growing exceedingly fond of this little management tool! When you sign up/in and authorize twitter, it analyse your twitter feed and hashtags and create a newspaper of tweet topics in a magazine format with a picture relating each topic to add visual appeal.  It is like a personalized page of topical tweets. You can take control of your page by showing topics you like and hiding the ones you don’t. At the moment it still is in Beta format and you can request to join. My page is here: http://www.twylah.com/maggiev.

Other tools (updated automatically from my bookmarks)

Classroom uses

These colourful resource magazines can be used in many ways in the classroom. Students can collect all the material that they are using in projects and add that to the magazine filters. In the case of Paper.li, for instance, langauge students can track resources shared by their favourite authors. Twylah can be used to create a twitter newsletter for different groups in the class.

Activity:

A the end of this activity you sould have at least 5 tweets.

• Create your own twitter newspaper using Paper.li and tweet about it using the  #ict4champions #day17 tags
• Subscribe to the ICT4Champions twitter newspaper ( so that you can keep in touch with what other in this group are sharing) here http://paper.li/ict4champions/1322925122 Share this link and invite others to subscribe to this paper as well. (#day17 #ict4champions)
• Share your thoughts on how to manage the twitter information overload in 2 or more tweets (#day17 #ict4champions)
• Think of at least one way that you can use any of the mentioned tools in your classroom/context and tweet about it (#day17 #ict4champions)
  

<—Back to main twitter un-workshop page

• Day 1: Getting started and getting others started
• Day2: The importance of your twitter profile
• Day 3: Who follows Who: the following dilemma
• Day 4: How do you read your twitter streams?
• Day5: How to have discussions in twitter?
• Day6: What are hashtags?
• Day7: Creating a classroom hashtag
• Day8: Retweeting the magic of passing along great stuff
• Day9: Direct private tweet messages
• Day 10: Sharing long website links on twitter
• Day 11: Sharing resource files and documents on twitter
• Day 12: How do you share videos and images on twitter
• Day 13: How to create easy-to-follow twitter lists
• Day 14: 6 steps to create a twitter backchannel for your classroom
• Day 15: How to create a twitter event backchannel for your conference or event
• Day 16: How do you backup your own or class tweets?
• Day 17: How to manage your twitter information overload

I know I always get too intimately and emotionally entrenched in my course development projects. This can be a good and a bad thing.

On the bright side, your passion and sense of detail hopefully translate into a product that is not only appealing but also soundly educational, innovative and meaningful. In any case, that is what you tell yourself to justify the 16 hour workday that you spend on it for months on end. Not to mention the feeling of being alienated from your family, your friends, your learning network and the universe in general. You completely forget to smell the roses.

Then there is the bad part. You lose all sense of perspective. You are so intimately involved, you become possessive of your baby and you don’t want to let go. Your course budget constraints have long expired and you keep nurturing monstrous scope creep while you carry on fine-tuning teensy weensy details that nobody will probably even notice in the global scale of things. Then there is the problem that due to your diligence, life has overtaken your course content and you have to keep on making adjustments to keep it relevant. Most of all, you don’t see glaring mistakes or even worse, you keep on seeing mistakes, missed  spelling and grammar errors, missing full stops…..

So I need fresh eyes. I am due to hand this over to the flash designer and I feel like a mother giving her baby up for adoption.  If any of you would like to test drive (another way of saying “please read with utmost care) this module section of an overview of social media (communication technologies), please let me know. It is one of the sections of a revised Open ICDL course (www.col.org/ccnc) that will be made available under an open courseware lisense once it has been packaged, “flasherised” and “scorminised” in Articulate.

If you are interested I will give you access to a folder in my Dropbox (you will have to create a Dropbox account), just leave a comment in this post below, asking for access. For those who have not used Dropbox before (amazing tool), once you have accepted my Dropbox invitation and installed Dropbox on your computer, you will miraculously see my course folder on your computer from where you can open the section’s PowerPoint presentation. You are most welcome to add comments in the notes area of the slide.

Due to the incredible popularity of twitter globally, more guides are being written every day. I have had to update my teacher twitter learning object twice, due to the twitter interface changing. I also have not began to scratch the surface as far as handy twitter applications are concerned, but then I discovered this comprehensive guide to twitter from Makeuseof which always gives a down to earth perspective and look at tools and gadgets.

My current twitter tools that I am using are:

Hootsuite:

As I have various alter ego’s (@maggiev @schoollibrary @hogsback @mathslitteacher- The last 3 are collaborative), this web based tool is really very handy. You do not have to install a programme on your computer as it sits in your browser. You can keep track of all your personas and create separate streams which helps if you are following a great deal of interesting people. You can create a stream group by adding followers or hashtags. For instance, you can create a stream to follow the learners in your class. Another advantage is that you can keep track of your tweet stats with detailed graphs and stats (always very interesting from a maths point of view)

My Diigo auto- bookmarkmarklet to twitter

Where twitter is the mouth  of my online learning, Diigo is the heart and as it has an auto twitter tickbox, I can automatically post my bookmarks to twitter on the fly by just ticking the box. All you have to do is to install the diigo toolbar and click on bookmark. The rest is seamless. Very handy.

Twibes (www.twibes.com)

Is a grouping tool and comes in quite handy when you have meetings or workshops. Previously I swamped my poor following with workshop/meeting tweets. I am sure not all my social media and edtech followers are interested in mathematical literacy and the hassles we are having with assessment, so twibes makes it possible to create an interest group around a specific hashtag and use it as a seperate backchannel.

Backing up tweets (http://printyourtwitter.com/)

Tweets are only visible for a period of time and it is therefore very important to back it up/print it. I do this once a month and also back up my favourite tweople’s tweets! This makes for some great bedtime reading!

But let me introduce you to this great guide for a few more (very comprehensive) step by step pointers……..

The Complete Guide to Twitter

When we ask learners do research on the internet, they are sometimes faced with inappropriate search results. This is any firewall administrator’s nightmare as well as a valid concern for most teachers and librarians. A search can also bring up millions of results, some of which are either commercial in nature or irrelevant. By creating a custom search engine we can make sure that learners only search within pre- approved search sites.

To create such a search engine is actually remarkably easy, the hard part is to collect relevant sites to populate your search engine with. I have decided to START with a kid safe search engine and built on it! Here is my search engine and a learning object that I have created to assist you to get going with your own one as well. I would be grateful if you can play with the learning object and let me know if there are any mistakes (grammar/spelling, broken links etc).

Come on try it out! Search for something!

Quite a few of my teachers have asked me how I get it right to twitter, bookmark, chat, engage in social media and get my work done. I do not always get it right to juggle everything as effectively as I would have liked to, but I have devised a way to slip in all the things that I feel strongly about into my workday in a way that I do not even notice that I am doing it. So I thought I will share it with you.

My main daily communication and resource tools are Twitter (microblogging tool), Delicious and Diigo (bookmarking tools), Google reader (keeping track of new posts from my network and all over) as well as Skype/gtalk (for real-time chat and support)

I check my Twitter , say, every 1/2 and hour or so. Mainly to see if my network has anything valuable for me to look at and to see if there are any @replies or direct messages for me to respond to. Twitter is an instantaneous learning tool – it is not as intrusive as e-mail and it is quick to scan. If I am passed a great resource (and my network is really brilliant, so I always have!), I look at it (click through from the tweet) and immediately store it for later reference and use. I do this …

• Using my Diigo button (installed when I downloaded the Diigo toolbar), a little window then pops up where the
  • Web address is automatically captured as well as…
    Whatever I have highlighted as a description. I always try and insert something relevant there as it makes it easier when searching for resources.
  • I can then tag the resource at the same time. This step is very important as it will make it possible to find the resource again (and that is what it is ultimately all about in the end) So I make sure that I tag it using relevant tags familiar to me.
    • I also use tags that I have set up in Diigo to perform certain actions..
      • like creating a automatic weekly blog post of all my resources tagged with that word (eg see all the weekly bookmark posts- they have been tagged with the word “school2.0” which then make Diigo create a blogpost once a week)
      • also have specific RSS feeds set up that will look for all the resources tagged with a specific word and then send it to a feed located on a different blogpost (eg ML123 tagged resources go  to my mathsliteracy blog feed, and resources marked with “mathematics” go to my mathematics social network on NING)
      • I can also decide if I want to send the bookmark (resource) to a specific list or group (eg if it is a maths literacy resource, I post it to my ML123 group or if it is a general teacher resource I post it to my Educator group)
  • The window also has a little checkbox which, if ticked, will send my resource to twitter. I love this feature as it is a quick way to share resources on the fly with those interested in the same things I am (maths, social media, teacher stuff, ICT4teaching&learning) who are following me on Twitter (instant learning).
    • All my twitters automatically go to my Facebook update, which means that in the process I educate my kids, family and Facebook friends (advocacy ) They moan bitterly about this!!!
  • I have also set up my Diigo to automatically post all my bookmarks to my Delicious bookmarking system as well
    • Diigo is like a database of resources (a very good user friendly one) and depending on how well I tag my resources, I can find anything, drilling down to the last detail, in seconds.
    • I initially started off with Delicious which is also a bookmarking system, but has a far simpler interface (I have tried both with my teachers and Delicious has been more user friendly for new computer users) It is not as social and do not have annotation and discussion features. This means that I physically have to go to it to see what my network is up to (which I do once a month and the tag back to my system). (See my Delicious learning object for teachers here)
    • The reason why am using both systems simultaneously is
      • I actually find that Delicious is an easier search engine to use
      • I have an established network on Delicious that I value and support
      • My novice teachers are on Delicious and I need to support them as well.

I check my Google reader at least once a day. Google Reader is a RSS (real simple syndication) tool that downloads (automatically) all the feeds (from articles) that I have set up for it to fetch.

• When I open it (and I always keep it open) I can see when anyone in my network/blogs/websites have updated their blog etc.
• Scanning through the heading titles quickly brings me up to date with the latest news and Edtech skinner
• and If I find something that I would like to use in future I tag it using my
  Diigo button (see above) –> database–> delicious–>twitter–>twitter replies. So this is a vital part of my daily professional development

Skype/Gtalk is my personal contact with the world and I mostly use it to support my teachers and stay in direct contact with my kids. I can talk anybody through anything using Skype. It is almost like being in the same room. I always mark myself as “away” (even if I am there) in order for me to have the choice to engage or not. This way people do not have to feel bad about bothering me, as they know that I have a choice to talk to them.

I do  not use Google search much any more. I rather search through my database (Diigo and Delicious) or ask my Twitter network directly. I only go to Facebook once a week and get my friend updates in my Tweetdeck or via my Friendfeed. As I find Facebook to be very “slutty” it can be a mindless distraction and I limit it for myself.  In a next blogpost I will highlight all the other tools that I use on a daily basis.

I am always inspired by Tom Barrett and what he gets up to in his class and within his e-learning community. This morning he lets us know (via twitter) about his latest collaborative little project (conducted in Google presentation) called “# (and growing) Interesting Ways* to use your Pocket Video Camera in the Classroom”

This is the first time I have used Google docs presentation and it was a very enjoyable experience! Very simple and easy to use. So the main aim is to create (collaboratively) a slideshow with ideas for using video capturing devices in the classroom. Once you get to the presentation, you can chat to others viewing it and ask questions.

To become part of this little project…

• Go to the presentation and take a look at what has been contributed.
• Add your one slide, one idea and one image:
  • Direct message Tom (d tombarrett  or @tombarrett) (the creator of the presentation) via twitter or e-mail him at thomasgeorgebarrett [at] googlemail [dot] com and ask him to add you as a collaborator (give him your e-mail address).
  • Sign into Google docs with your Google e-mail address and password
  • Once he has added you, you will see the document in your Googledocs list
    
  • Double click on it, which will open it in a new window/tab
  • Click on Slide (top menu), and choose New Slide and pick a template slide
  • Create your slide and save (As easy as that -for help with how to use google docs presentation, click here)
  • Change the presentation title slide to match the number of ideas.
  • Let Tom know that you have created the page (tweet about it to @tombarrett and don’t forget to add the document address for others in your network to also get involved!)

Check out Thirty Five Interesting Ways to Use A Pocket Video Camera in The Classroom here!

Using this ‘Twitter for Gmail’ gadget, you can easily tweet from your Gmail inbox without having the hassle to log into Twitter each and every time. The best part is that, unlike some other Twitter applications and gadgets, apart from having the ability to send messages (tweets) a user can also view the tweets by his friends and followers from within Gmail inbox itself. (Source)

How to:

• Go to your gmail account (http://www.gmail.com)

• Click on Settings (top right)

• Click on the Labs tab

• Scroll down to the bottom and enable “Add any gadget by URL“

• Save changes

• Now click on Setting–>Gadgets in your Gmail window

• Paste in the following url: http://www.twittergadget.com/gadget_gmail.xml

• Your Gmail page will reload and you will see a blue widget on the left- fill in your twitter username and password

• Voila- now you can twitter straight from your gmail account!