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 15: The Hologram Story

I work with a phenomenal team of people. We don't always see a great deal of each other throughout the week as we pop in and out of the office on our way to and from schools across the county. One way we keep in touch is through Twitter. (You can see what our entire team has been tweeting by checking out Pat Miller's list here: https://twitter.com/pmillerscdsb/lists/pit-2015-16).

Tuesday evening, I saw this tweet:

Turn your Smartphone into a 3D Hologram | 4K @szwildcat guess what we're making tomorrow! #steam @scdsbmath https://t.co/qYdZwhlGbq

— SCDSB Arts (@jamilamonahan) September 22, 2015

Turn your Smartphone into a 3D hologram? Let's just say this: if you want to do an 'upcycling' project to create a device that turns iPads and smartphones into hologram viewers, you don't need to twist any arms in our department. Those of us who were going to be in the office Wednesday morning offered to bring supplies, and we were off and running.

In the morning we got down to business, creating templates for our CD case pieces on millimetre graph paper, carefully cutting out plastic pieces with utility knives, and trying out different types of glue to see what would best hold our device together. In true PIT fashion, we streamed the whole process on Periscope and viewers from all over the world checked in to see what we were making.

In the end? It worked. (It's really neat; you should try it.) But what happened next was what made this more than just an impromptu craft activity. We tried to improve upon our original design. We built a couple of larger templates. We talked about other materials we could use. We shared our project with nearby colleagues inside and outside the department. We discussed all of the curriculum connections (math, science, art, etc.) that this activity could support. We discussed classroom safety concerns and modifications for different age groups.

Do you think we'd allow our learning to stop there? Of course not! Later that day when we went home we shared the hologram devices with our families and continued to create bigger, better, and different devices. I made one out of an acetate sheet. My husband used my model to create a template for making more, and proceeded to use this as an activity with his math class on Thursday.

Made a template to create a hologram using acetate instead of CD cases. Works! http://t.co/3D62hDf7br pic.twitter.com/uFibcPd0Be

— Amy Szerminska (@szwildcat) September 23, 2015

All of us shared our learning with our families and let our own children check out the holograms. They were a big hit. Lisa Boate used her dog's e-collar to build a larger hologram device that she took to a school with her the following day to share with a students. Their reaction sums up the way we all felt about our first glimpse of one of these holograms:

@pmillerscdsb @SCDSB_Arts @szwildcat @mapleviewheights students amazed by holograms! #sofun #STEAM #SCDSB_Schools pic.twitter.com/9NRb2XCGv0

— SCDSB Math (@scdsbmath) September 24, 2015

Jamila recognized the power of the hologram activity to inspire. I am grateful to her for running with this inspiration and I know that all the thanks she really needs is to see the ripple effect it created.

Sometimes it is OK to drop everything for the sake of making something beautiful. (As long as you have the appropriate safety equipment, of course!)