Seven Ways to Use Twitter in a Classroom | Teachers use Social Media to Enhance Classroom Experience Social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter are continuing their rise in popularity and there are no signs of this growth stopping soon, as is evidenced by the 42% of high school students who currently use Twitter. Smart educators who opt to use Twitter in the classroom are sure to see improved student grades as well as creative and positive results in other areas. If you have not entered this realm of social media, it’s easy to pick up on the basics of Twitter and enjoy its benefits for you and your students. Here are seven innovative and motivating ways to bring the world of Twitter into your classroom: 1. It’s not hard to find subject experts such as historians, mathematicians or authors on Twitter, many of whom would be willing and eager to tweet their expertise with your class. 2. Students’ grades improve when everyone is engaged in monitoring the learning process. 3. 4. Twitter can be a fun and educational trip-tracker. 5. 6. 7. Final thoughts Content provided by U.S.
10 Tips To Help You Use TweetDeck And Twitter More Efficiently I wish I was a celebrity so that I could just sun-bathe and watch my Twitter (and other) follower count pile up into a long, list-less, disorganized bunch. But I am not, and so if I have to actively use social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+, I have to be efficient at them. I have to streamline them so that I can mine a blink-and-you-miss source like Twitter for information. For long, my tool for the job has been Tweetdeck. Note: Most of these tips are applicable for the older Adobe Air version of TweetDeck. Create a Custom Alert for a Keyword Much like Google Alerts, you can set up a TweetDeck Twitter alert with any keyword or a combination of keywords of your choosing. This could be a powerful tool in your hand because it’s like a fishing in the vast Twitter stream – lay your bait and wait for it bite. Search For Tweets By Location On TweetDeck You create a new search column and use: <Keyword> geocode:x,y<km/mi> Translate & Un-Translate Foreign Language Tweets
The Top 27 Free Tools to collaborate, hold discussions, and Backchannel with Students 1- ChannelME ChannelME is a great web tool. It allows its users to browse a particular website simultaneously. They are able to look at the same content of a web page with friends in real time and even chat with each other . 2- Search Team It allows its users to search in small teams and collaborate to find the best search results. 3- Mind42 Mind42 is a great collaborative mind mapping tool . 4-Entri Entri is a free collaborative tool for writing and sharing documents . 5- Bounce It is “ a little application that lets people quickly add feedback to any webpage and toss that back and forth with other people” . 6-Wiggio Wiggio makes group work much more easier as its easy and straightforward design provides everything you need to work productively in your groups. 7-My Simple Surface My Simple Surface is a very simple online whiteboard. 8- Hackpad This is a tool to develop collaborative note-taking and writing outlines. 9- Synchtube Synchtube is a great free service for watching videos. 16- Dweeber
12 Twitter Tools Every Educator Must Know about Social networking is a topic that I have been posting about for sometime now. I have published a set of series on this issue and will soon be adding more to it. You can check out Educational Social Networking from part one to part 4 to learn more. Twitter is one of my top social networking tool that I use for both professional development and educational purposes. 1- TweetDeck This is a great Twitter app that allows users to arrange their feeds with customizable columns, use filters, schedule tweets and stay up to date. 2- Tweet Back Up As its name suggests, this is a tool to help you back up your tweets and your followers too. 3- Splitweet This tool allows you to access multiple Twitter accounts and also be able to separate your educational and personal accounts from each other. 4- Followize This is an awesome tool that lets you instantly read all your tweets in a very user friendly interface. 5- Qwitter 6- HootSuite This is one of the most popular platforms online. 7- Twups 8- TweetGrid
Twitter, PLEs and PLNs Thought I would share some bits of my thesis on Twitter, PLN’s and PLE’s as others might find it useful. What is a PLN? For all of the conversation occurring among educators about PLNs, there has been surprisingly little academic research on PLNs (Couros, 2010, p. 123). A Personal Learning Network (PLN) is a network of people you connect with for the specific purpose of learning (Tobin, 1998). Digenti (1999) defines a PLN as: relationships between individuals where the goal is enhancement of mutual learning which is based on reciprocity and a level of trust that each party is actively seeking value-added information for the other (1999, p. 53). Couros (2010) echoes Digentis notion that a PLN is defined by the relationships among the individuals when he states that: “a PLN is the sum of all social capital and connections that result in the development and facilitation of a personal learning environment” (2010, p. 125). References Lalonde, C. (2011). Couros, A. (2010). Digenti, D. (1999).
Quick Guide: How to Speak ‘Twitter’ Okay, let’s start at the very beginning for those shrewd late adopters who don’t use certain technology until it’s absolutely ridiculous not to. With twitter, we may have reached that point–that critical mass where you should at least get on board to fully understand what it is you’re rejecting. Twitter is a social media platform that allows you to connect with others. It has formal academic potential that we explored recently that make it a difficult tool to ignore for any progressive-minded educator. Like text messaging, you are limited to 140 characters in your messages. Unlike text messaging, your messages aren’t sent to a single person, but anyone that follows you–and viewable by the world. Why Tweet? Why would you want to “tweet” to the world? Twitter started out as a “microblog” service that allowed users to talk about ideas in (extraordinarily) brief terms. Yes, you can block people that follow you, but don’t be paranoid. Right? ?
Teachers' Quick Guide on The Use of Games in Education Online gaming plays a major part in most of young people's lives. The gaming trend that started off as a sole leisure activity a couple of years ago is now integrated into the mainstream and more and more people are using them on everyday basis.Game developers and business corporations are generating billions of revenues out of their sales .In March 2008, a government-funded report from DCSF indicated that sales of games for the under 12 age group represented nearly three quarters of the total UK games market. 87 % of 5-16 year old have a game's console at home, and the enormous success of the Nintendo Wii has shown that new technologies can reach and hold audiences never expected to enjoy playing online or computer games. Regardless of the negative features associated with gaming such as frivolity, violence and mindlessness, games do have a growing potential in education. The main Factors behind the raise of Digital Game-Based Learning What makes a learning game ?
10 Commandments of Twitter for Academics - Do Your Job Better By Katrina Gulliver Most of my friends (the ones who are not already on Twitter) have heard my Twitter pitch, and it's true that since joining several years ago I've become quite an evangelist. Recently over dinner, a colleague told me he had never really gotten the point of Twitter, but now that he had a book to promote, he wished he had followers he could share it with. Twitter is what you make of it, and its flexibility is one of its greatest strengths. I'm going to explain why I have found it useful, professionally and personally, and lay out some guidelines for academics who don't know where to start. The first and most obvious benefit has been helping me get to know a lot of great people whom I probably wouldn't have met otherwise. Thanks to Twitter, I have been sent copies of obsure articles much faster than I would have received them from an interlibrary loan. A common error I see some academics make on Twitter is to set up an account solely to promote a new book or project. 1. 2.