Day 44: Twitter

Today an educator asked me to explain why he should join Twitter. I took a few minutes to gather my thoughts before responding with my reasons and a few resources for getting started. I thought I would share my response for those who have wondered what the hype is all about...

Why I love Twitter:

• a powerful tool for sharing and conversations - Sylvia Duckworth’s infographic Should You Use Twitter?
• help students find and create awesome stuff - check out Find the Awesome, Create the Awesome by George Couros
• follow @SCDSB_LandT to explore and discuss learning and teaching ideas, then try searching hashtags (Guide to Twitter Hashtags) or participating in a twitter chat (see the Best Twitter Chats for Teachers in 2015)
• read about and share what is happening in our schools using #SCDSB and follow @SCDSB_Schools

Resources for getting started:

• create a Twitter account using your name (Mr.Kemp’s 10 Steps to the Perfect Educational Twitter Account)
• an Infographic that summarizes Twitter for Educators
• The Ultimate Twitter Guidebook for Teachers
• establish a Twitter routine in the classroom and with your professional account
• try TweetDeck to follow your favourite hashtags

TweetDeck

Tips for classroom Twitter accounts:

• have a conversation with your administrator about how and why you will use Twitter with your students
• share with parents how you plan to use Twitter with students
• consider privacy when choosing a classroom Twitter handle
• before sharing student personal information ensure their media release form is signed
• students need to be 13 to create an account
• consider how you will incorporate digital citizenship - ex: check hashtags before including them in a tweet, giving credit for pictures and resources you share.

Day 43: Using TweetDeck to Organize Twitter Feeds

Recently Marci Duncan posted an excellent blog entry encouraging the use of Twitter. Someone suggested in one of her links that Twitter is a great source of professional learning. While I agree with this, the flip side of the coin is that Twitter can sometimes be a little overwhelming. Marci touched on TweetDeck as a useful Twitter feed organizer and I’d like to expand on that idea just a little bit.

I had the privilege of attending Web 2.0 Boot Camp a few years ago in Philadelphia with Will Richardson, @willrich45, author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Will suggested that a great way to get started with Twitter was to follow personal interests. So in addition to my education and math related feeds I added some of my sports gurus and entertainment heroes as well as some friends. All good fun! Except as I expanded my network of follows, and as they became increasingly prolific, my Twitter feed blew up. Too many feeds on too many topics! I had to stop the madness…

Enter TweetDeck. Thanks to David Petro, @davidpetro314, fellow math educator and technology enthusiast whose session I attended at the annual OAME Conference, I now use TweetDeck to organize my feeds into personalized categories that make sense just for me. TweetDeck lets you organize your feeds in multiple ways. Here are a few of my favourite strategies:

Lists: This allows me to group feeds by person. My Education List includes math gurus such as Dan Meyer, @ddmeyer, as well as SCDSB shining stars such as Mike MacAlpine, @MichaelMac151. To see what members of my Program and Innovation team are saying I scan my P and I List. 

Keywords: Sometimes it is beneficial to collect tweets by topic, rather than person. Using hashtags, I can follow all tweets that include key words such as #growthmindset and #scdsbmath.

Notifications: This interesting feed column shows me all the activity of the people whom I follow: their favourites, mentions, new follows and retweets.

Activity: Curious about who your new followers are, or who is retweeting your tweets? This column shows you all activity directly related to your Twitter account.

Scheduled: Got a great idea for a tweet in the middle of the night, but worried that it will be missed? Tweetdeck lets you easily set a scheduled tweet that goes out during prime time or on any time and date of your choosing.

Notifications and Activity are where I often find intriguing new people or topics to follow. TweetDeck automatically sets up these and other default columns, including Home, which is your running feed of everything you follow, as it would appear in Twitter. List and Keyword columns are just some of the types of columns you set up yourself.

So now I have my work-related feeds set apart from my more personal ones. Some power users actually have multiple Twitter accounts to further this separation. But I don’t roll that way: I like to have ready access to all information all the time from one simple platform. One feature I really like about Tweetdeck is that it allows me to easily change the order of my columns. That way, when I am at work, I can focus on education and math related tweets, and when I am on vacation I can switch things around so that I get my Habs updates and entertainment scuttlebutt first and foremost.

There are various ways to access TweetDeck. I currently recommend downloading the TweetDeck Google App from the Chrome Web Store. For more information about setting up TweetDeck to organize your Twitter feeds, check out the following links:

TweetDeck for Beginners: Setting up TweetDeck

http://cjrogers.com/tweetdeck-for-beginners-setting-up-tweetdeck/2914

TweetDeck Columns

https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169914

Organizing My TweetDeck with Lists and Collections

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MuBPONNzv0

Day 39: Video Announcements

At Byng PS we always struggle to find the best time for morning announcements. Often the kindergarten students are in the coat area and are not yet into the classroom.  If you wait for the kindergarten students then it falls in the middle of the intermediate lesson. The idea was born to do video announcements.

On the day before, staff and students put any announcements in the announcement binder. Students take the announcement binder and use the ipad (Green Screen by Do Ink) app to video, then import the videos into imovie. At a staff meeting towards the end of last year all staff were given the time and training to get established on google drive. The videos are shared on the google drive each day. Each classroom chooses the best time to show the video in their classroom with the least amount of interruptions.

Our goal is to have the students independently create our announcements and a teacher only needed to supervise the filming.  In collaboration with our board’s Innovation team, we will be running a student workshop to develop student ability to generate ideas, plan, conduct interviews, present orally in an effective way, film preproduction and post production.

Students will develop various segments that will be incorporated into the announcements on different days of the week.  For example, we currently include a segment called “Things that Make you Go Hmmmmm” where the students choose a photo that encourages classes to discuss questions related to the photo.  We are looking forward to classrooms sharing their learning and successes through photos or video in the shared video announcement google drive folder and then incorporating these clips into our announcements.  We are hoping that creating an extended audience for student work will help to engage them in their learning.

Our video announcements are a work in progress but we are looking forward to our continued growth!

If you have any questions please contact us: Lesia Collicutt and Joanne Larmer

Day 30 : Multidirectional Learning

A wise woman once said there is "No day without learning", and today was no exception!  This afternoon we worked with a passionate group of educators who wanted to dig into Blogging!  We realized quickly that we needed to take a few steps back before we could progress. Last year, our system moved forward rapidly with technology enabled learning, yet we are still on a learning curve.  After a summer of digital detox, we need to have patience with refreshing our own skills. We can relate to those students in our class who come back after a summer and may be a little rusty with some of their skills.  Our learning continues to move forward, but sometimes we need to take different directions (or step sideways or backwards) to regain our momentum.

Using the EasyBlogger Jr app

Learning can also shift direction based on the influence of our collaborators.  Today we experienced new learning when one of the participants shared the gadget on Blogger for Google Translate. This enables us to be more inclusive of the increasing multicultural communities in our county, as we communicate on our blogs.

Setting up our first blogs!

The journey will be ongoing as several of the participants in our session are going to continue their learning down different paths. Some will back up and revisit areas they wish to explore further, others might step sideways and explore other platforms or tools to support them, and some might even take a rest from the journey.  We felt honoured to be tour guides "on the side" as we brushed up on our skills and learned on our own pathway. We invite you to join us in our trek toward making our learning visible through blogging.  A "roadmap" for this excursion can be found in this shared Google Folder: bit.ly/EasyBloggerJr

Louise Owen & Marie Swift