School 2.0 in South Africa

Work through the material on flipped classrooms here

My talk at the ICT in Higher Education Forum aims to get academics to develop their digital presence,

<—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:

• Week 1
• Week 2
• Week 3

How do you create a tweetdoc?

• Go to www.tweetdoc.org and register for an account (if you want to)
• Enter your hashtag or twitter username (e.g. @maggiev) into the create dialogue box on the right and click on create tweetdoc
  
• Insert your search term. If you want to back up a class twitter stream for the day, insert the class or event hashtag (e.g.#ict4champions). If you want to backup your personal tweets as well as the people who have replied to you (@you) you can insert @yourtwitterhandle (e.g. @maggiev)
  
• Click on the date range and complete from when to when you want tweets to be recorded
  
• Change the amount of tweets to the maximum (500) and untick Show newest tweets first, in order to read the tweets chronologically.
  
• Click on Create tweetdoc, you will see a processing message.
  
• Sometimes this message just hang. Wait for a few minutes and refresh your page. You will then see the document ready for you to click on to open.
• You can now save the document on your computer or share it by posting the link as a tweet.

Tweetbackup (www.tweetbackup.com)

This tool back up all your personal tweets on a daily basis.

• You just log in using your twitter username. It will authorise Tweetbackup to allow it access to your twitterstream.
• Enter your email address and allow the programme to send 1 autotweet (tick the box)
• You can then login with your twitter account every time

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.

• Create a backup document of a specific hashtag of your choice (e.g. #edchat) using Tweetdoc.org. Share the tweetdoc url with us via a tweet. (#day16 #ict4champions)
• Create a personal backup using any one of the other tweet backup tools and tweet your personal backup. (#day16 #ict4champions)
• Create a weekly backup of your tweets from now on and tweet it so that we can keep track of your workshop progress and use it as evidence for your edu-twit certification
• Respond to others tweets and retweet at least one other user

<—Back to main twitter un-worksho 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

<—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!

• Share a PDF or wordfile with us in a tweet using www.filegooi.co.za (something relevant to your subject area that will be interesting for us to look at or use)
• Share a PDF or wordfile with us in a tweet using www.filesocial.com
• Be sure to Reply to at least one person (preferably a newbie teacher twit) in our #ict4champions stream commenting on the resource that they have shared.
• Share in a tweet how you could using file-sharing via twitter in YOUR classroom or context.

<—Back to main twitter un-worksho 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
• Day 9: Direct private tweet messages
• Day 10: Sharing looong website links on twitter

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

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.)

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

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.

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.

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.