Tech Tips for Teachers

Hey there! I'm back and I'm set to do some more posts, screencasts, podcasts of the things I have learned about using tech in teaching. I hope that you find some of the ideas on this blog useful and can use it in your daily instruction. As part of my professional growth plan, I will be using my blog to become a more reflective practitioner of education (Doesn't that sound official?). Anyways, getting back to what this post is really about: TWITTER I discovered it a few months ago. It really is quite a powerful tool for networking and sharing information. At first, I was the same as everyone else, I thought "so what?". Who wants to use only 140 characters to communicate an idea anyways? The stream of information that pours onto a first time user of this service is chaotic to say the least. In fact, its overwhelming and trying to make sense of the twitter stream is impossible at first.

So my first piece of advice for those of you who want to try Twitter is to get a good Twitter client ( a piece of software that works with the Twitter service). My recommendation for this is Tweetdeck It really helps the user to make sense of what is going on in the community. That's the important thing here folks. This is a community, and it is a live conversation. The next piece of advice is to use a hashtag or # sound sign when you do a search on a topic of conversation. This allows you to track results of conversations going on about a given topic. Tweetdeck allows you to do this quite easily and this is why it is such a powerful twitter client.

This is an example of a screenshot of tweetdeck. It is broken up by columns so you can see what is going on in the stream. In the ALL Friends column you have the tweets of all the people you are following. In the next column there are the mentions ( this is the column where people have sent public replies to your tweets). In the next column you can do hashtag searches. Think of these search columns as chat rooms where people update information about a certain topic.

One search I use quite regularly is #edchat. Edchat is where educators from around the globe come onto to twitter to share educational tips and discuss issues that affect teaching practice. A lot of what is discussed is related to using tech in teaching. The one thing that I have found is that the atmosphere or conversation on edchat is quite inviting and friendly. I have learned a lot from these educators and they have posted links to resources I might have not found otherwise. It also gives a perspective into how education is approached in different parts of the world.

So this is just one way I am using web 2.0 tools to build my skills as a tech teacher and life long learner. To end this post I thought I'd leave you with a Common Craft Video that explains Twitter in plain English. Next post a Tweetdeck tutorial!