Mar 30 2012
The lecturer that flipped
Work through the material on flipped classrooms here
Mar 29 2012
My talk at the ICT in Higher Education Forum aims to get academics to develop their digital presence,
Nov 29 2011
<—Back to main twitter un-workshop page
As we have discussed before, tweets do not stick around for a long time and you need to take responsibility for backing up your twitter stream for later reference. This also goes for backing up your class tweets for every day as well as your conference/event tweets. It is a good idea to ask one of the students to take responsibility for doing this at the end of every lesson. You (or the responsible student) can then share this document with the rest of the class so that they can revise the day’s lesson using the tweets as summary.
The tweet backup document can also come in handy when writing reports after you have attended a conference or event. If you make a backup document of a conference hashtag, you will not only get your summary tweets, you will also see others’ comments and input.
There are a few 3rd party tools that you can use to do backup tweets. Some only allow you a limited amount of tweets to backup, others allow you to backup your entire twitter stream.
Tweetdoc.org
This user friendly site allows you to create a PDF of up to 500 tweets at a time into a good looking printable document.You do not even have to register for an account to be able to create a backup document. It is a good idea to register for an account though, as you can then keep track of the tweetdocs that you have created. See our workshop #ict4champions tweet summaries here:
How do you create a tweetdoc?





Tweetbackup (www.tweetbackup.com)
This tool back up all your personal tweets on a daily basis.
It will make an ongoing backup of your personal tweets, so it is important that you create a backup sooner than later. My backup was started a year ago and have about 7600 tweets archived. It can only go back 3200 tweets, so now is the time to sign up for your backup! You can export your tweet archive as a text, rss, csv or html file. If you copy your archive link under Settings you can tweet it.
Twapperkeeper (http://twapperkeeper.com)
Another good tweet backup service is Twapperkeeper. Here you can create an archive from a hashtag or keywords as well as from any twitter user.
Just login with your twitter username and you will be able to search or create archives according to various filters. For instance, you can just choose to archive someones (e.g. @maggiev)’s #mathslit tweets.
Activity:
By the end of this activity you will have 2 backup documents and have send at least 4 tweets.
<—Back to main twitter un-worksho page
Nov 16 2011
<—Back to main twitter un-workshop page
We hopefully by now have established that twitter is a great way to share resources on the fly. As we saw yesterday @tmmash showed us how easy it is to Cut and Paste a website address into our tweet as well as shorten it. @Love_DA pointed out that the twitter interface lately even auto-shorten all long links pasted into a tweet. Very handy!
Today, however, we will investigate how to share actual files on twitter. Say for instance you have a document like a test that you would like to share with other teachers of your subject. There are many options to do this. Twitter has not yet made it possible to do this within its user interface, so we will now start looking at 3rd party tools that makes this action easy to do.
If you are a South African teacher, we have a local server (www.filegooi.co.za) that makes it fun to upload your file and share it anywhere (in emails, on twitter,Facebook…). All you have to do is to go to www.filegooi.co.za, choose your file and click on “Gooi” (which means throw in Afrikaans)
You will then see an upload progress screen and will be presented with a link that you can share (Day10) by cutting and pasting it into your tweet (or where ever).
It is always a good thing to mention in your tweet that it is a document or file so that everyone that want to click on the file know that they will be opening an actual file and not just a website address, which may involve more bandwidth.
As you can see I have indicated that it is a [pdf] file. You can also use [doc] if it is a document file or [ppt] if it is a presentation file. When you click on the link in the tweet it will open the file in the relevant application (in this case adobe reader). If you want to know about dropbox see @Lady_Chocoholic ’s tweet here:
Another 3rd party filesharing site that allows you to upload files to twitter is http://filesocial.com/ Simply attach your file, write something and a link will be posted to your file. In a few seconds! It supports most file types and uses oAuth (twitter authentication) so you don’t have to sign up.
It will give you an opportunity to add to your tweet (e.g. #day11 #ict4champions) and you can choose to just upload it or post it to your twitter timeline:
Don’t forget to mention in your tweet that it is a powerpoint file [ppt]
Activity:
When you have completed this activity you should have send at least 4 tweets sharing at least 2 resource files. Remember to add #ict4champions and #day11 to your tweets!
<—Back to main twitter un-worksho page
Oct 26 2011
I am attending and presenting at 2 conferences/workshops this week and has been asked to share my conference Twitter getting started kit.
Please feel free to use/download the starter kit presentation and adapt it for your needs. (creative commons attribution, non commercial, share alike license)
My co- conference twits at the ICT in Higher Education -An african perspective, please remember to use the hashtag #ICTHEDAFRICA instead of #HEDS11TUT
Aug 04 2011
I am asking to date yourself now, but if it will make you feel better- what old technologies did your parents and grandparents use that is not in existence any more? My dad was a gadget mad so we use to get all the thingies that that could switch on and off which probably explain why I am still so crazy about gadgets. I remember my tape recorder fondly and definitely the 16mm “movie recorder” where we had endless footage of our holiday by the sea. I loved my vinyls and still have a huge collection hiding in one of my cupboards. See which of the devices you recognise. (This video had us in stitches at the recent #schoolnetsa11 conference.)
Mar 31 2011
My topic for the Africa Higher-ed in ICT conference is quite a mouthful and I decided to focus on the how instead of the theory by looking at the following in a practical way:
Twitter- A higher order thinking tool to engage and move your students towards innovative learning habits.
Before you arrive for the conference, please set up a twitter account so that you can participate in the back channel. To see a comprehensive overview of twitter for educational purposes and all my twitter4ed resources, click here.
A step by set instruction of how to set up a basic twitter account
Feb 10 2011
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.
Sep 29 2010
I am still on my campaign to get teachers to share resources using digital libraries and twitter. Social bookmarking as database and twitter as communicsation and networking tool is unbeatable in creating a lifelong learning ecology that is free and rewarding.
Mar 24 2010
I am at the ICT in Higher Education Conference in Sandton today and it is interesting to get a perspective on ICT from the viewpoint of lecturers and management of higher institutions. I am so used to working with teachers and schools and it is quite clear that they come from a different tangent altogether!
The proceedings started off with my old colleague at the DOE Leila Goosen giving us a perspective on how the government is implementing their ICT goals See my leila tweets here
Then Laura (from Centre of Educational Technology at UCT) talked about the possible pitfalls of ICT for education. Her very flashy Prezzi is a must go-though : My learning tweets for her are here.
ICT in HE Conference March 10 on Prezi
Farivar Rahimi spoke about the role of ICT in Higher Ed with special reference to disadvantaged students, cultural aspects and motivation. My tweets for him are here
Juliet Stolenkamp, one of my longtime virtual learning colleagues, did a wonderful expose of the factors contributing to implementation of ICT in complex higher ed environments with specific reference to the sterling work they are doing at UWC. My netbook ran out of power during her presentation but I think there is a few tweets here, and I will chase her up to publish her presentation.
Catherine Wangeci is the project manager that will hopefully be rolled out to South Africa next year. She presented her project on teacher education programmes in Sub Saharan Africa. My tweets on her talk is here
Reza Bardien, the education lead of Microsoft South Africa showcased MS products and their connected learning community framework that could be of benefit to Higher Ed.