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Five-Minute Film Festival: Twitter in Education

Five-Minute Film Festival: Twitter in Education
I think it's fair to say that Twitter can no longer be dismissed as a trivial passing fad. Though I had dabbled with a personal account, my entire opinion changed when I started my @VideoAmy account and dove in to the conversations educators were engaged in. While some people certainly do tweet about what they're having for breakfast, teachers, administrators, and educational organizations use Twitter in a whole different way -- making smart use of those 140 characters to share resources, wisdom, and inspiration. With the wealth of information out there, you have to cut through the noise a little to figure out how it will work best for you. PLN-building?

9 Simple Tips For Connecting With Your Students On Twitter 5 Tools For Creating Your Own Infographics Five years ago, almost nobody knew what the heck an infographic was. (I sure didn’t, and I was a graphic design major in college at the time.) Now that the infographic craze has saturated us with new visual knowledge (and marketing gimmicks), something interesting has happened: The creation of infographics has become democratized. No longer is the act of creating a visual data story confined to professional designers using professional tools like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. Now anyone with a data set can build an infographic. (See also 5 Business & Design Tools Every Tech Freelancer Should Learn.) Trust me when I say that with these tools, you don’t have to be a designer to create a high-quality, effective infographic. With that in mind, I’ve cobbled together a list of five services/methods that even non-designers can use to create or commission great infographics. Infogr.am: All The Bells And Whistles Infogr.am is free, and free is good. Piktochart: Drag-And-Drop Templates Galore

6 Powerful Tools to Find Your Customers on Twitter Finding customers can involve attending networking events where everyone grabs their 100 business cards, puts on their best suit or “business hunting outfit” and then lurks at the back of the cocktail party ready to pounce after surveying their prey from a safe distance. You can always “hope” that the person you buttonhole will tolerate your witty, clever banter and that they will be interested in what you have to say about you, your company or your product. If you are lucky you may meet 2-3 people and it will be hit and miss whether they are interested. Now face to face business networking certainly still has its place but there are ways to make it more efficient and effective Find Your Prospects On-line There is a better way to do this and it involves technology and it enables you to take your stalking on-line that removes the uncomfortable tension of that cocktail party. Two Ways to Find your Target Keyword, Phrase or TagCategory 6 Twitter Tools 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Which one do you use?

Twitter Fiction Festival As part of the Twitter Fiction Festival, W. W. Norton will broadcast Shakespeare's best monologues and sonnets, line by line, via re-tweets of the Bard's timeless words already posted by Twitter users. The result will be a crowd-sourced, real-time, dramatic performance of the classic works that brings Twitter into the telling. Follow along at @wwnorton and re-tweet with us. Again; Relevance, Why Twitter November 29, 2012 by tomwhitby Twitter has been a topic for educational Bloggers for several years now. I believe that those educators using Twitter are drawn to those posts, while other educators, not using Twitter, are driven away. I earned an advanced degree in Educational Technology over 30 years ago. In the distant past, teachers were able to maintain their relevance based on printed journals, newspapers, and magazines. Educators need a better way to communicate about change in order to maintain their relevance. Too bad an application of Social Media like Twitter was developed for such a frivolous purpose. If only an educator with the highest of degrees would invent such a collaborative tool for educators to do all of the same collaboration with real valuable education stuff? I must admit that this post comes from the frustration of listening to the many excuses from educators who choose not to use Twitter. Like this: Like Loading...

A Complete Guide to Using Blogger In School - 81 Page Free PDF Since 2006 I have used Blogger for many blogging projects including this blog and many classroom blogs. Over the years I've introduced many teachers to blogging through Blogger. Blogger is easy to use and flexible enough to support you when you're ready to start using some advanced blogging strategies. I've covered the basics of Blogger and blogging in various blog posts over the years. This week I finally put all of those posts together with a series of annotated screenshots in one cohesive package, A Complete Guide to Using Blogger In School. A Complete Guide to Using Blogger In School covers everything from blogging terminology to blogging activities to the nuts and bolts of using Blogger. A Complete Guide to Using Blogger In School is embedded below. I'm going to allow downloading the guide for the rest of the month.

6 Tips on How to Use Twitter's New Vine Video App for Marketing Twitter is underwhelming at 140 characters. Any sane person would say “What do you do with that?” Why limit yourself to so few words when there is a dictionary and an encyclopedia available and limitless communication at your disposal. Its brevity is both an enigma and its charm. Keeping it simple is not without success precedent. One of the most successful children’s books of all time was written with only 50 words. Simple is good. The history of short and simple Just over twenty years ago on December 3, 1992 the message “Merry Christmas” was sent by software engineer Neil Papworth to the Vodafone director Richard Jarvis. That was the world’s first text message. Who would think that 20 years later that: 6 billion messages would be sent every day in the USA2.2 trillion texts would be sent every year in the USA8.6 trillion SMS messages would be created every year around the planetText messaging would be a $150 billion a year industry It is the messaging of choice for most teenagers. Why bother?

wwnorton : We're excited to be part of... Our Biggest Twitter Tips For Teachers For many teachers making a foray into the edtech world, Twitter is an excellent tool for consuming and learning. There are a number of great resources out there to help teachers follow people who will be useful to them based on location, subject, grade level, and technology being used. Many are also harnessing Twitter as a part of their PLN (personal learning network) to connect, share, and network. So how do you bridge the gap from reading tweets in your feed to truly harnessing the power of Twitter in the edtech realm? Check out our biggest Twitter tips for teachers below! Care to add your tips? Create, Don’t Just Consume The best way to get the most out of Twitter is to use it. Connect and Network When you’re just getting started on Twitter (or perhaps trying to add to or refine your feed), a resource for educational hashtags or guides to great accounts to follow are excellent resources to point you in the right direction. Share Your Resources Keep At It

44 Better Ways To Use Smartphones In The Classroom 44 Better Ways To Use Smartphones In The Classroom by John Hardison first appeared on gettingsmart.com This week an online article grabbed my attention. Its title read “94 Percent of High School Students Using Cellphones in Class.” I immediately scoped out the heading and thought to myself, “Finally, teachers are beginning to embrace the powerful little gadgets.” One quotation in particular caused serious professional introspection on my behalf. I understand the tougher task of using regular cell phones in class versus internet ready smartphones, however , I could not disagree more with the above quotation. A blessed trip to the ISTE 2011 conference in Philadelphia helped me devise a BYOD classroom management plan and opened my eyes to the infinite educational potential of smartphones in the classroom. However, one of my toughest baseball coaches once said, “Potential and a dollar will get you a Coke.” 44 Better Ways To Use Smartphones In The Classroom Use Smartphones to Collaborate

How to Herd Cats on Twitter If there is one thing you have to love about Twitter is that sometimes it seems like the “Wild West”. Untamed but with many opportunities. At other moments it feels like you are herding cats. A chaotic stream of tweets that have no apparent organisation, theme or filters. Wikipedia says this on herding cats: “An idiomatic saying that refers to an attempt to control or organize a class of entities which are uncontrollable or chaotic. Now doesn’t that sound like Twitter? It is trying to make sense of its chaos, embracing a jumble of jellyfish or throwing a net over a swarm of bees. Always fun, sometimes dangerous but with a lot of potential. Twitter has its own rhythm Facebook is filtered for family and friend fun. Well… what about Pinterest? And Instagram? A distraction in the form of an app that makes you stop what you are doing as you walk and travel. Twitter is a torrent of humanity. It’s quick and sometimes requires little thought and it shows. So how do you herd? It’s not needed. 100inShare

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