School 2.0 in South Africa

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Jan 11 2012

Day 18: Managing twitter from your desktop using tweetdeck

Published by bshallowes under Twitter,Workshops and conferences

<—Back to main twitter un-workshop page
If you have been following the un-workshop you have learned the basics of Twitter.com. Day 17 introduced some ideas on how to keep track of important tweets. Today we will introduce a useful management tool that will make it possible to tweet from multiple “personalities” and help you to keep track of diverse hashtag topics all in one! This will make it possible to separate your personal and teacher personas and even add your facebook account. So you can create a separate twitter account for your teacher role.

The following post was kindly volunteered by a great and inspiring teacher @bhallowes:

So what is Tweetdeck? According to Wikipedia, “TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR desktop application for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn , Google Buzz, Foursquare, and MySpace.” We will be focusing on using it for our Twitter account for now.

Search for Tweetdeck (in Google) and download the free application to your desktop. It will ask you to set up a Tweetdeck account. One can use the same username and password as one’s Twitter account to simplify matters. Once installed, this is what Tweetdeck looks like.

You will notice it is divided into columns. It is these columns that help organise your Twitter account and your hashtags.

The default columns are from left, All Friends (this is where your Twitter stream appears – rather like your timeline in Twitter.com), then Mentions. This means that if anyone re-tweets one of your tweets or mentions you that post will appear in the Mentions column as well as in the All Friends column. The last default column is Direct Messages. This is where your direct messages that you send or receive will appear. They will not show up in your All Friends column because they are to or from you personally.

At the top left of your Tweetdeck your will see the three buttons for action. They look like this:

The yellow square with the pen is for writing a new tweet. Click on it and give it a try. Send a tweet telling us you now have Tweetdeck installed. Don’t forget to add #ict4champions to the end of your tweet. Great!

The next button is a circle with a plus sign in it. This is to add a column to your Tweetdeck. Click and you will see a window open in the middle of your deck.

You can then give your column a name using a hashtag #. If you were setting up a new event such as a conference, you would create your own hashtag, but in the case of this un-workshop the hashtag #ict4champions is used. Type it into the box and press Search. What do you see? A new column should appear with the hashtag at the top and very soon the column is populated with the tweets that have been sent using that hashtag. Now you can see at a glance who has posted to the un-workshop and who is and active in the course.

Remember that if you have a lot of columns on your deck you just have to use the horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the deck to move across and view them. Try adding another hashtag such as #sateachers or #edtechconf.

The last of the three action buttons at the top left of your deck is for finding a quick profile or list. If you have seen a tweet that looks interesting and you might want to follow the person but you’d like to check out their profile first try this:

Click on the Quick Profile button and type the twitter name of the person you want to view in the window that appears. A new column opens up with the profile of the person you are thinking of following. You will also find a Follow button at the bottom of their profile column. Click it to add them to the list of people you follow and then close the profile. You will now be following that person.

Below these three action buttons on the left is your account/ accounts that are logged into Tweetdeck. You may set up a number of accounts – such as a personal one, a school account or a class account. They can all be logged into Tweetdeck by clicking the Add More Accounts button. When you want to send a tweet you can click on one or more of your accounts and the tweet will be sent from them all – or just the one you choose.

Now move across to the top right of your Tweetdeck where you’ll find five more buttons. These are Refresh, Single Column View (you can toggle between single and multi column view with this one), Settings, Support and Log Out. These five buttons are pretty much self-explanatory and they are best explored and experimented with at leisure. Below these five buttons, also on the right, is the option to add one’s location, upload a photo or a video or log out.

Now we come to the fun part of the Tweetdeck. This is the open strip below the buttons where you will type your tweet. You would then press Send. If you are copying a URL from a website it’s best to select the text, press Ctrl+C to copy it and then click next to your tweet text and use Ctrl+V to paste it. One trick Tweetdeck does is to auto shorten your URL’s. Make sure the auto shortening facility is on by clicking the button below the typing strip and to the left of the hashtag button. Click it to select ON.

If you are part of an event like this workshop remember to add the hashtag e.g. #ict4educators. In order to facilitate the easy addition of hashtags, Tweetdeck has a button below the typing area with the # on it. This will open a drop down menu and if you click on that it will give a list of all your recently used hashtags. Double click the one you want and it will be inserted at the end of your Tweet. Now all that remains is to press Send on the right.

The last thing for you to do is explore the set of buttons at the bottom of each column. Columns can be moved to the left or the right of your Tweetdeck depending on their popularity; they can be filtered by different criteria; marked as read and cleared of all seen tweets.

To close a column, look for the blue Twitter t on the top right of the column next to your user name. As you hover over it an X will appear and pressing that will close the column.

But how does one retweet or send a direct message using Tweetdeck? Hover over the avatar in a tweet The icon will change into four squares with different functions. Hover your mouse over an avatar and see what happens.

Did you find the re-tweet and reply buttons? Find a tweet you would like to reply to and click on the reply button. Reply to a tweet from someone in the un-workshop and let them know you have found the reply button in Tweetdeck.

Try clicking the re-tweet button on the avatar. The tweet will now appear in your message pane and the beauty of Tweetdeck is that you can Edit the tweet before sending it! Once you have selected a tweet to send try adding the #ict4champions hashtag to let everyone in the unworkshop know how fantastically fast you catch on.

The third button on the avatar is the Direct Message button (the one that looks like an envelope). When you send a direct message to someone it will appear in your Direct Messages column of your Tweetdeck. Lastly explore the Other Actions part of the avatar. Use this option to carry out one action on this tweet such as email it to someone or translate it – or whichever action grabs your fancy.

That covers the basics for installing and using Tweetdeck. This is by no means an exhaustive tutorial and it’s for you to play and explore and share your findings with the un-workshop. We all learn from one another. Enjoy!

Activity:

Install Tweetdeck by going to http://www.tweetdeck.com and download the application.
Create a separate column for your #ict4champions twitter stream
Send a tweet telling us that you have installed it and that you are ready to post from multiple personalities!
Retweet one tweet sent by another member of the un-workshop.
Reply to at least one tweet from a member of the un-workshop.
Carry out one “other action” on a tweet – don’t forget to add #ict4champions.

<—Back to main twitter un-workshop page

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Dec 06 2011

Day 17: How to manage your twitter information overload

Published by maggiev under How to (Tutorials),Twitter,Workshops and conferences

<—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

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Nov 29 2011

Day 16: How do you backup your own or class tweets?

Published by maggiev under Twitter,Uncategorized,Workshops and conferences

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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?

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

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Nov 25 2011

Day 15: How to create a twitter event backchannel for your conference or event

Published by maggiev under Twitter,Workshops and conferences

<—Back to main twitter un-workshop page

Even though the steps discussed yesterday for backchanneling in the classroom, can also be applicable to conferencing and events, your objectives will not not necessarily be the same. Where it can be deliberately used to support teaching and learning in the classroom, at events it is an organic way to enhance conferencing objectives of networking, information sharing and event marketing.

More and more conference and event organisers are realising the importance of facilitating and embracing an official event backchannel stream. “Partwicipants” at events nowadays expect to network, discuss presentations and share thoughts using twitter as their communication channel. Some comments from delegates at the last few conferences were we had a “facilitated” backchannel:

“At first I found the screen with constantly updating discussions irritating, but by the 2nd presentation I was mesmerized and enjoyed the additional information and illuminating comments.”

“The best thing about this conference was the twitter screen. It summarised everything”

“I was forced to tweet the session from my cellphone and found that I remembered much more about the presentation afterwards”

“My colleagues who did not attend with me could follow the entire conference from work and give input as well- it was almost as if though they were here as well!”

Having a twitter backchannel for an event can start creating a buzz even before the start of the event. It allows people to start networking, start seeing who will be there and give them the opportunity to “check them out” as well as start talking to them. By the time you meet face to face you already have some common ground which result in networking on steroids. I have found that the connections I have made in this way have, in every instance, become lifelong learning partners.

Why you should have an official backchannel stream?

If event organisers do not actively facilitate an official twitter conference stream, it will be organically created by the participants themselves. Those, used to interacting using twitter, will create their own hashtags and this can result in disjointed discussions that can be hard to track. By having an official backchannel, you can turn every hashtagged tweet into a marketing tool and your event will reach people in real-time who are not even physically there. They will experience the event through the tweets of those who are present and can become part of the discussion, bringing in fresh perspectives. Instead of your event being restricted to a few people it can potentially be “attended” by thousands of people globally!

As conferences are getting more and more expensive, institutions are very picky about which ones they allow their staff to attend. If a conference/event has a facilitated backchannel you will be able to “virtually” attend and actively participate in the conference. If the conference organisers have the wisdom to make sure that every session has a summariser (see later) you will be able to participate remotely. This can result in the event trending (becoming talked about regionally) due to the high tweet rate, adding to the buzz and reach of the conference. By engaging with a conference backchannel you will also be be to tell, from the “objective” twit-chat, if the conference is worthwhile to attend in the following year.

The flip side of this is that if you are the organiser, you have to be prepared, you have to facilitate and you have to actively be seen to promote a transparent communication channel. As a twitter backchannel is an open communication channel, you also have to be prepared for “negative” feedback and comments coming through. By setting up an official backchannel you can “set the stage” and guide the rules of engagement as well as address issues as they arise.

Steps to set up a backchannel:

Create an official hashtag for the event and incorporate that into all correspondence, brochures and emails as well as all your other online platforms (blogs, website, Facebook or Google+ page etc.)
Let people know that there will be a twitter backchannel and encourage them to start communicating with each other and with you about the event. (Get the buzz going)
Send delegates a Howto backchannel tutorial to get those who have not used twitter before a chance to register and get comfortable with how to use it to follow the event stream (see my example and feel free to adapt it and use it for your own event under Creative Commons Attribution licence)
Appoint backchannel facilitators (summarisers) for every event session. They will be responsible for summarising what a speaker is saying, submitting screenshots of presentation as illustration, post links mentioned, retweet relevant commentary, focus speaker’s attention on questions in the stream, block spammers, and deal with (or pass on) issues about the event.
Organise free internet access and a seperate twitter stream screen (e.g. 2 screens = 1 for the presentation and 1 for the twitter stream in the main event hall and preferably in all the venues, as well as in the “social” area like the dining or exhibitors hall. This way people missing other streams or presentations can still participate across events.
Start the event off by explaining how the twitter backchannel works and suggests rules of engagement (or put a looped presentation on while delegates wait for conference to start, explaining how it works).
Create a tweet summary (PDF) at the end of every day (e.g. tweetdoc.org) and tweet that to the stream so that people can have a printout of the backchannel discussions. See this example of the #schoolnetsa11conference tweet summary.

If you are planning an event or conference at your school, you should seriously consider creating a social media strategy that does not just entails twitter as a communication backchannel, but will integrate and automate all the essential platforms where your audience “hang out” e.g. twitter, Facebook, Google+, a blog and your school/organisational website.

How do you particpate in an event backchannel?

Here are a few guidelines to get you started. You can …

Find out what the event hashtag is (from the organisers) or create one yourself if there is none, and let them know.
Search for the event on twitter and save the search so that you can keep track of it.
Summarise the main points that the presenter is sharing. This can be a summary for your personal use if you need to write a report about the event later!
Read what others are saying and respond.
Ask and respond to questions.
Share additional links in support /critique of what is being discussed.
Be polite and constructive.
Network: arrange to meet up with someone (at the conference) face to face via twitter
If you are attending “virtually” ask someone at the conference to tell you what the event is about and provide you with a website link for the event.

Activity: (#day15 #ict4champions)

On completion of this activity you should have posted at least 2 tweets with the above hastags included in your tweet.

Read the twitter summary of the #Schoolnetsa11 conference and tweet what the conference was all about (you can send more than 1 tweet)
Follow a current conference (for a collection of face to face and online events see my list here) of events and tell us about it in a tweet (See example)

<—Back to main twitter un-worksho page

My time for working and supporting on this workshop is sponsored by Casio SA. Thank you for making this unworkshop possible!!

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Nov 23 2011

Day 14: 6 steps to create a twitter backchannel for your classroom

Published by maggiev under Events,Twitter,Workshops and conferences

<—Back to main twitter un-workshop page

“Back-channeling” is were the magic of using twitter in the classroom really kicks in. It refers to establishing a hashtag for your classroom/event/conference and actively promoting it to be used actively in real time by participants during, but even before and after the event to stimulate discussion and feedback. Wikpedia refers to it as “ the practice of using networked computers to maintain a real-time online conversation alongside live spoken remarks.”

Backchanneling can be used to achieve different goals within varied contexts (classroom, events, conferences). You will not necessarily have the same objectives when using it in a classroom to when you use it for an event or conference. It must be made clear that a backchannel can evolve with or without our intervention. For instance, if event participants, on twitter, start talking about an event of their own accord. We can however, pro-actively facilitate the backchannel process and when we do this in a classroom context, we can bring in some measure of control to see to it that educational objectives are reached. For this reason I will deal with backchannels in the context of a classroom separately to when we use it at an event or conference which we will look at in Day 15. In the controlled context of a classroom we will set up a backchannel as a managed environment and use it as one of the tools to make learning happen in a visible and to some extend measurable way. Let us see how we can attempt to do just that.

Step 1: Setting it up (practically)

Students can, strictly speaking, follow the backchannel discussion on their mobile phones, but I have found that having a visible twitter screen alongside your presentation screen REALLY encourages interaction and discussion. This practically means that you need to have 2 data projectors set up with 2 screens. Only advantaged schools can afford this, so more often than not it means that you will switch between your presentation and the twitter screen, leaving the students to engage with you using twitter on their mobile devices or laptops. The ideal is to have 2 screens where the teacher presents the topic (see screen on right) while the participants or students discuss what is being said and comment (screen on left).

When your twitter screen is not visible all the time, you need to create regular intervals to show the discussion screen. You can use questions time to swap back to the twitter screen and your presentation screen.

Step 2: Create and share the hashtag with your students

Next you need to create a hashtag to focus all the discussions around the classroom topic (see how to in day 7). For classrooms I suggest that you do this at the beginning of the school year and maintain the momentum throughout the year. Make sure that the students have the hashtag in advance so that they can start preparing for your classes (what should we bring; what is the lesson going to be about; pre-questions; pre-instructions).

Step 3: Choosing the display tools

As you would like everybody in the room to be able to read the backchannel discussions, you will need to enlarge the normal twitter hashtag stream. There are a few good 3rd party tools that you can use to show off your backchannel optimally. These tools will show tweets as it happens (in real time) and you do not have to refresh it regularly as it should ideally auto refresh. Tweetchat (see previous image) is a good backchanneling tool which allows you to…

Set the refresh speed (how quickly it loads new tweets)
Pause the stream (if you want to focus on a specific tweet e.g a question or answer) and
Block certain undesirable individual’s tweets.

A few other backchanneling display tools to use…

Wiffiti (http://wiffiti.com/screens/85882/) randomly displays tweets and is a good display to use during breaks and before the class start. It also have a realtime timeline display choice. As you can see, you can even embed the display in your class blog (or wherever).

Visibletweets creates bright colourful tweet pages that can be displayed as tag clouds (handy to see who are participating as well as the main words) or rotating tweet windows. See our tweet cloud for the last few days…

For more backchannel tools, check my database for an ever growing list of tools.

Step 4: Backchannel “control” (some ideas)

It is a good idea to appoint a backchannel moderator to help you manage the twitter class stream during a lesson. Appoint, on a rotation basis, a student to keep an eye out for questions and bring your attention to when students go “off topic”. Even if questions do not come up, schedule discussion breaks regularly where you bring the twitter backchannel into play, and show the stream. For low tech classes, you can let the students write down their tweets on a piece of paper and have a student per group enter the tweets using a cellphone or laptop.

Step 5: Structure

If we want to use a tool like twitter we need to be clear about how we want to incorporate it into the lesson structure. It has to support the outcomes we want to achieve. By using twitter to provide structure to your lesson, it moves from just being a tool to being a way to engage ALL the students in a meaningful way. Some ideas for incorporating the backchannel in the classroom:

As an instant feedback system: Ask questions and students answer via the twitter stream (using the hashtag as marker)
As a way for students to have a voice and to encourage discussion.
Assessment (We will look at twitter assessment instruments like polls and questionnaires in a further day)
Ask students to summarise what everybody are saying. (It is great practise to summarise)
When students work in groups, instruct them to summarise group ideas using twitter- it can result in a diverse cross pollination of ideas. You can then pull everything together by going through the twitter stream.
Students can submit classwork using twitter (e.g. take a photo of work/upload a file) and you can then randomly display and work through submissions.
For more ideas see the following articles: http://www.diigo.com/user/maggiev/backchannel%20uses

Step 5: Evaluate and reward

A good way to get students into the process is to assess their involvement in the lesson via twitter. You can give them an assessment rubric (before the time) of how you will evaluate their class participation in the twitter stream. Here is something to get you started…

Minus a point for every “off topic” remark.
A point for making at least 3 entries (chit-chat relationship building kind of tweets)
Two points for summarising exactly what you/others are saying.
Three points for sharing links that can add to the discussion (articles, simulations etc)
Three points for resp0nding meaningfully to others.
Four points for analysing what you/others are saying and giving their opinion.
Five points for creating innovative content relating to the topic at hand.
………..

See @love_da ‘s self assessment rubric that he created for his students, or you can download it from here :

You can, at the end of a lesson, use a twitter analysis tool to show the student a graph of their interaction on the twitter stream using tools like Archivist . It is amazing what a little bit of peer pressure can do! We all want a piece of the pie! (Click on image to see the live stats for our #ict4champions workshop stream- do you feature?)

Step 6: Closure

A good way to end of your twitter backchannel supported lesson, is to make a word cloud of all the tweets and show it in a cloud picture. This involves copying and pasting the entire twitter discussion for the lesson into a word cloud maker. A fun one is www.tagxedo.com. It allows you to delete stopwords that are not applicable. It will also show the main strands of the twitter discussion as well as enlarge contributors names according to their involvement – evoking participative peer pressure yet again! You can choose a funky shape and colour scheme to finish things off. Remember to share the cloud picture link as well as the tweet analysis in the backchannel stream…

Activity:

At the end of this activity you should have send at least 5 tweets: Remember to insert teh hastags #day14 #ict4champions

After reading the articles here: http://www.diigo.com/user/maggiev/backchannel%20uses , discuss (in 3-6 tweets) what backchanneling is all about and how you would like to use it in your classroom. (#day14 #ict4champions)
Create a user graph from your hashtag (or any hashtag of your choice) using Archivist and tweet the graph link to the (#day14 #ict4champions) stream (e.g. http://archivist.visitmix.com/ict4champions/1/User )
Create a tagcloud from your hashtag (or any hashtag of your choice) using www.tagxedo.com and tweet the tagcloud link to the (#day14 #ict4champions) stream (e.g. http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html?submission=d75b23b0d1404dc5).

<—Back to main twitter un-workshop page

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Nov 21 2011

Day 13: How to create easy-to-follow twitter lists

Published by maggiev under Twitter,Workshops and conferences

<—Back to main twitter un-workshop page

Twitter has a feature which allows you to add people to lists and group them together around a theme, context or subject (e.g. all the teachers from South Africa are on my list called Sateachers (https://twitter.com/#!/maggiev/sateachers) .

When you click to view a list, you will see a stream of all the tweets from the users included in that list. This is a handy way to keep track of specific people connected to a grouping (in this case South African teachers). You are not required to follow the individual users on the list even though you can choose to do both (add them to a list and follow them). If you use twitter in the classroom, it is a good idea to add all your students to a classroom list, but please do no feel obliged to follow your students (I advise you not to). You can then check the list to see what they are up to without having to follow them or have their general tweets in your stream.

If you follow too many people or your stream is quite busy, you can miss out on specific people’s tweets. I put all my educational “supersharers” on a separate list (https://twitter.com/#!/maggiev/ed-favourites) which I check regularly (at least once a day).

You can create a private list (only you can see it) or a public one, which allows anyone else to follow it as well. Following someone else’s list does not mean that you follow each person on the list, but that you can see all the tweets of the people contained in the list when you choose to visit that list. Sometimes it is a good idea to follow a few of the lists of experienced users instead of creating a list from scratch. To see all my lists, you can go here https://twitter.com/#!/maggiev/lists . Following a list is as simple as following any other Twitter user. Simply click on the Lists tab when viewing their profile, and select a list to see what it is about and what the people on the list are up to.

Click the follow button to follow one of their lists. (E.g follow @nharms Ed Tech Leaders list)

How do you create a list?

To create a new list, follow these instructions:

Visit the profile of the first user you would like to add to your list
Click the person icon. This brings up a drop-down menu.
Select “Add to list“
Choose Create a list
Enter the credentials of your list and choose whether others can see it or whether it is private.
Check to see if the user you wanted to add was successfully included in that list: to do this, click the person icon (see step 2) and select “Add to list”. A checkmark will be added next to lists in which that user is included:

If you have registered to be an official #ict4champions #edutwit you will be listed on the workshop list: https://twitter.com/#!/list/ict4champions/twitter-unworkshop-1

You can keep track of which lists you are included on by going to your Profile, and clicking on Listed on the right and side under your profile.

What is the difference between a #hashtag and a (class) list?

We have seen that a hashtag unites people around a topic or activity. You can keep track of what people are sharing in this workshop by checking the hashtag #ict4champions regularly. In this stream you will see tweets relating to the activities in the workshop, very similar to the kind of situation that you will encounter in a classroom.

In a list, however, you will see the workshop/class tweets, as well as any other tweets that the participants are sharing, not necessarily relating to the #ict4champions/classroom topic. You can also see who are on the list (e.g. in the class) and it can be a quick way to get students to follow one another by telling them to follow everybody on the class list. (Is this necessarily a good thing though?). You will also see how popular a list is by the amount of people following the list itself.

In summary we can say that creating a list is a way to manage followers and to make sure that you do not miss out on certain people’s tweets. It is also a way to follow what a group of people are saying without having to individually follow them. A list will not have any value to you unless you check it regularly.

Activity:

At the end of this activity (#day13 #ict4champions) you should have created at least 2 lists and 2 tweets

Follow the unworkshop list (at least for the duration of this workshop until the end of January)
Create a list for people who teach the same subject as you and tweet the list link.
What would you rather use with your classroom, a list or a hashtag or both? Tweet your answer.

<—Back to main twitter un-workshop page

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Nov 17 2011

Day 12: How do you share videos and images on twitter

Published by maggiev under Twitter,Workshops and conferences

<—Back to main twitter un-workshop page

Students loves visual material and we all love multimedia! Youtube is one of the biggest social media sites with more than 500 tweets a minute containing YouTube links.

Students can take videos of their classwork and share it via the twitter back channel. We are talking quite a bit of bandwith here, so we need to carefully consider if this is the way to go. Mostly, there are so many educational videos available to use in the classroom that sharing them quickly via twitter is a good idea. How about asking the students to find a suitable video to explain a concept and sharing it. Be sure to put time restrictions in place, otherwise they will get lost in the 500 videos per minute!!

Sharing videos from youtube

Go to http://www.youtube.com/education and find a suitable video for your class. For instance I would like to show my maths class the video What Mathematicians Actually Do. Click on the Share button. You will see the shareble link which you can copy and paste into your tweet (see day 10). You can also just click on the twitter icon which will sign into your twitter account and create a tweet with the link inserted already.

If you click on the twitter button it will auto insert text and the link.

Sharing photos

Showing what is happening in your class make your learning context real for others. We all like to see photos of ourselves in context. If we really want to get inventive we can ask the students to take a photograph of their work (maths solution, summary…) and submit it to the twitter stream.

Twitter has recently incorporated a photo sharing button into the tweet interface. If you look towards the bottom left of the tweet you will notice a little camera. If you click on it, it will open up the navigation window where you can go and attach a picture located on your computer.

This picture will then be inserted into the tweet as a link as well as show up on the right hand side of the twitter screen when you click on a tweet in your timeline.

As twitter has aquired the third party photo sharing tool Yfrog, all the photos that you submit to twitter is kept at Yfrog like an online photo album. You can also tag twitter users in Yfrog.

Of course it becomes very easy to submit photos from your cellphone or mobile device. Most smart or feature phones have the ability to take a photo and submit it straight to twitter or Facebook.

Activity:

By the end of this activity you should have submitted at least 3 tweets , 1 video link and 1 photo link.

Take a photo of your workspace/place and submit it in a tweet. (See examples above). If you do not have a mobile device, take the photo with your camera, download the photo onto your computer and then attach it to a tweet as described above.
Go to www.youtube.com/education (Youtube’s educational portal) and submit an inspirational educational video link as a tweet for us to look at.
Reply to others who have submitted photo and video links.
Don’t forget to include the hashtags #ict4champions and #day12 into all your tweets relating to this activity.

Thank you to Casio SA for sponsoring my time to work on my maths literacy community and this workshop! It is great to know they care so much about teacher development!!

<—Back to main twitter un-worksho page

Thank you to Casio SA for sponsoring my time to work on my maths literacy community and this workshop! It is great to know they care so much about teacher development!!

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Nov 16 2011

Day 11: Sharing resource files and documents on twitter

Published by maggiev under Twitter,Uncategorized,Workshops and conferences

<—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

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Nov 14 2011

Day 9: Direct private tweet messages

Published by maggiev under Twitter,Workshops and conferences

<—Back to main twitter un-workshop page

Even though twitter communications are about transparency and openness, there are times where you would like to have a private short discussion with someone. Okay, you can send them an e-mail, but as you have discovered by now, the short message facility of twitter makes quick communications so much more effective and effortless.

There is one snag though. The person that you want to send a direct message (DM) to, has to follow you first. You can ONLY send DM’s to your followers. If they are not following you, your message will simply not go through and give you an error. This in a way, makes twitter far safer than email. Only people who you choose to follow can send you messages.

To send a direct message, click on Messages to the top of your twitter screen:

You will then be taken to an interface similar to an inbox where you can see all the people that you have send private messages to as well as how many messages you have send them.

If you click on any of the people, you will see your private communications to them on the right hand side in reverse chronological order.

You can carry on your discussion in the “Send a message” window to carry on the discussion with your chosen person. If you want to send someone new a message, you can just click on the New message button.

This will open up a DM dialogue window. You can start typing the person’s name to whom you want to send a message, which will immediately show you a dropdown of choices.

If you do not see the person’s name in this dropdown, it means s(h)e is not following you and you will not be able to send them a message.

You can also send a direct message straight from your normal status update window by inserting a D and the persons name into the tweet. Note that you do not put the @sign in front of the twitter name!

By default, your direct messages will also be send to the e-mail address that you registered with twitter, making extra sure that you always get your message even by email. If you are using a twitter app on your phone, it is a good idea to set it to make a sound. This way you will never miss out on an important direct message to you! You can send use DM’s like sms’s…

Why use direct messages?

Direct messages should only be reserved for private messages that has no educational value for your followers. It should be those messages that would clutter up your stream and be irrelevant to others. For instance, in the discussion above, me and Brenda are finalising her contribution to this workshop.

The rule should be: if it has educational value to others- do it in your in twitter stream, not privately, as we will then miss out on learning from the conversation between you and the other person.

You can also only send a direct message to one person at a time.

Educational uses of DM’s:

Your classroom twitter handle can follow all the students and if it needs to guide someone in a “more subtle way” (you know what I mean) you can use a DM to nudge them a little bit. You can also use it for corrective measures, e.g. if they go off topic during a twitter classroom session. Although I would do that publicly to deter others form doing the same!

I will from time to time need to send you private messages during this unworkshop, and in order for me to do so I am asking you to follow my workshop handle @ict4champions so that I will be able to send you messages. I will also make sure that I follow you back so that you can send me private messages. It will be great to follow one another so that we can practice DM’s, so please try to follow everybody who is part of this workshop stream #ict4champions.

Activities:

At the end of this activity you should have send 3 direct messages (DM’s) and 1 tweet.

Follow @ict4champions and rest of the people contributing to the #ict4champions stream. (If you have forgotten about how to follow someone see Day3)
Send me @ict4champions a direct message telling me how you are coping with this workshop.
Send at least 1 DM to 2 other people asking them to tell you 1 thing that is true- tweet this as an “open tweet” into the main workshop stream. E.G

Remember to add #ict4champions and #day9 to the tweet.

<—Back to main twitter un-worksho page

No responses yet

Nov 12 2011

Day 8: Retweeting: The magic of passing along great stuff

Published by maggiev under Twitter,Workshops and conferences

<—Back to main twitter un-workshop page

When we participate in our learning community in twitter we become human filters of information for our followers. This makes twitter even more powerful than Google when it comes to disseminating valuable bits of knowledge. Every piece of information that you pass on in a tweet can act as a catalyst for a learning network partner (the people in your twitter personal learning network) to act on and use. If they find the “knowledge titbit” useful, they will pass it on to their followers, who in turn pass it on to their followers, which set in motion a possible exponential knowledge chain of information sharing. This is where retweeting comes in.

Retweeting creates an echo of knowledge or information sharing. It is an effortless way to pass on information quickly. You can use it to……

Pass on current information like events
Pass on great resource links:
Share tips and tools:
Pass on requests for help:

To retweet, all you have to do is to hover your cursor over a tweet and click on the Retweet link. It will post the tweet into your stream for your followers to see.

Twitter unfortunately does not allow you to edit the tweet before you retweet. This means that you pass on a tweet exactly as it was posted. If you see a new face in your timeline, it’s because someone you follow retweeted something they thought you should see. In the message, you’ll see the picture and username of the original user, who was retweeted by someone you follow.

If you want to add to a retweet e.g. a hashtag, you will have to copy and paste the tweet contents into the status window and add the additional info. Remember to add RT in front of the person who you are reteetings name.

We will see how third party twitter clients allow you to do this effortlessly in a future day! Mobile twitter apps gives you the choice to quote (were you can add to the tweet) or just retweet directly.

Activity:
A the end of this activity you should have send at least 5 tweets