Posts tagged twitter
Why I Use Twitter
0Honestly, I can’t even imagine doing my job without Twitter now, or some form of a personal learning network. Twitter is only as powerful as the people you’re following, and it’s going to be a different experience for everybody. Here’s just a few ways I’ve found Twitter useful:
As I first started following educators, I found there were many sharing tips and techniques for teaching in the classroom. One thing educators on Twitter seem to love doing is sharing links with others. You can watch how they communicate with others, too, and find even more followers this way. Many educators tweet their new blog posts, so Twitter can be a great tool for finding new blogs you may not be reading. There are also sites like Twellow and Mr. Tweet which can you help find many more (for a more exhaustive list created by educators of great Twitter apps, see Twitter Freaks on Diigo).
What I’ve also found useful is when educators attend technology conferences such as NECC (now ISTE) or FETC. Many of them take along their webcams, set them up during presentations they attend, and tweet the Ustream links. As a result, I can watch some great professional development sessions from the comfort of my office or home, without paying a dime.
Twitter is great for learning about emerging technologies. As soon as a teacher catches wind of a great new site that just came out, you can bet it’ll make its rounds on Twitter. Whenever I need help figuring out the best tool for a particular job, or tracking down a video I remembered seeing several months ago, I can always count on my Twitter network to help me. I just ask a question and within a few minutes I may get a dozen responses back. One way to think of Twitter is like a chat room you can take anywhere you want, filled with people you choose (since most people you follow will follow you back). It can turn into quite a vast learning network.
I recommend checking out the following session by Jeff Utecht at the 2007 K-12 Online Conference: http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=205 Twitter was still brand new at this time, but there were already teachers flocking to it. During this presentation Jeff has Twitter open and casually uses it to connect with educators and has them share insights. It quite aptly demonstrates just how connected Twitter can make you. It’s what made Twitter click for me, at least.
Resources
- Nine Great Reasons Why Teachers Should Use Twitter
- Top 100 Tools for the Twittering Teacher
- Twitter for Teachers and Experts
- Twitter in the Classroom?
- Twitter Tutorial for Teachers
- Twitter4Teachers Wiki – Giant list of Twittering teachers to follow
TwitterLocal in Coralville
1As I demonstrated earlier, TwitterLocal is a great tool to receive updates on events happening around the world. The recent flood in Coralville, Iowa shows another example of how people can stay connected and receive ground-level news from the people affected. One Coralville resident used Twitter to start up a group Flickr album for the Coralville floods.
Monitoring Current Events with Twitter
1Technical Level: Beginner
Type: Practical Applications
Yesterday Business Week ran an article about how Twitter has impacted how people communicate. Twitter is a “microblogger.” Microblogs are short text updates; similar to blogs, but shorter and without the “frills.” There are other microblogging services such as Jaiku and Pownce, but Twitter is by far the most popular.
The power of Twitter is that you can effectively construct your own, unique social network of people whose Twitter messages (called “tweets”) you follow. Another strength is that messages can be posted from anywhere, including mobile devices using SMS. When someone in your network posts a message, your RSS reader, or instant messenger, or cell phone, or whatever you may be using to receive tweets is updated. You could use this to receive helpful real-time tips from other teachers, hear what’s currently happening at the latest teachers’ conference, receive instant alerts to your cell phone, and so on. One student even used it to get himself out of jail.
There are some pretty cool applications for Twitter. TwitterVision and TwitterMap use Google Maps to display tweets while TwittEarth displays tweets on a 3d globe. TwitterTroll and TweetScan are search engines that let you find other Twitterers who share your interests, or search through all the latest tweets. TwitterMail and MessageDance integrate Twitter with your email account, so you can receive and send messages directly from your email box. There are many, many other applications as well.
In all honesty, Twitter really isn’t an application for everyone. Not everyone needs the real-time feel of knowing what’s happening in everyone else’s lives, and there are other ways to connect with other people online. Nevertheless, it can be a useful tool in the classroom. There is even a school-based Twitter-like network designed for students, called Youth Twitter. How do you think you could use Twitter in a lesson or homework assignment?
Robert Scoble, PodTech.net‘s Vice President of Media Development, was watching his Twitter account when the May 12, 2008 earthquake began in the Sichuan Province of China. Some in the area were Twittering about the earthquake while it was happening. Over the next few hours, Twitter was flooded with reports, pictures, and videos from people at the ground level.
TwitterLocal is a useful tool that monitors messages coming from a geographic region. If we want to learn what people are currently saying in Sichuan, we visit the site, type in “Sichuan,” and come up with a list of the latest tweets. Most of them are in Chinese, but a visit to Google Translate fixes that.
After selecting “Chinese to English” and entering the TwitterLocal URL after we found the Sichuan tweets, we have this:
This is a powerful tool for students to feel the riveting effects of international incidents, to find out how they are affecting real people, in their own words, through their own photos and videos, and to be even closer to the scene than watching what the news shows.
