It was a b-e-a-u-ti-ful spring break! I had a great three days of rest and then suffered a horrible headache for the rest of the break. At least I had a great excuse to stay in bed, relax and do a bunch of NOTHING! I hope your spring break was a great as mine.
Now on to the good stuff. Today I will be talking about the use of Twitter and Social Bookmarking. Then of course I will wrap up the day by sharing a lovely new teaching tool I have found.
Twitter and Education
Now I have been using Facebook since my 3rd year of college and love it. I have thoroughly avoided Twitter because I was worried about trying to keep up with so much social media. BUT I have decided to join the rest of the world in tweeting, flitting about, and sharing short but meaning full stories. If you have been hiding under a rock for a few years here is a brief overview of what twitter is:
Like I said before, I was very skeptical about the upkeep of another social media site. Twitter is not like Facebook in a sense that you are not supposed to follow peoples life. It is means to be a quick short amount of information and it is not meant to be a story line like keeping up with people on Facebook. If you keep this in mind Twitter is great!
Twitter's quick and short responses allows for you to have full conversations with people all over the world with the use of hashtags (#). In the video above there is a list of great hashtags to try out, but I have tried a variety of hashtags just to see what pops up. If I find someone that is interesting I follow them. Back to the idea of using twitter to chat with people all over the world. There are actually scheduled discussions for educators where you can share out new ideas and see some new ones also. Here is a website that is a schedule of twitter chats: Twitter Chat Schedule. Let us know some of your favorite education hashtags below in the comment section!
If you are allowed (I am not!) to use Twitter in your school district for teaching purposes here is a few great lists of ideas of how to use it in your classroom.
- TeachHUB List
- Daily Genius List
- Edudemic List <<< has a whole "how to" section for Twitter!
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is a way to organize the hundreds of bookmarks you already had and organizer your future bookmarks. We all search the web for great lesson ideas, to find out what the common core standards are trying to say to us, and the latest teaching strategies. If you use traditional bookmarking to keep track of everything then you end up with a huge list of things you are not for sure why you saved them or what is on them. By using a social bookmarking website you can track and make notes about what the sites are about and what you planned to use them for in the classroom.
This week I actually played around with a social bookmarking site called Diigo. First things when you sign up I would add the Diigolet to your bookmark toolbar. I have found that I have been using the social bookmarking tool more with this add-on. It will automatically add your bookmarks to the site without you having to go to the site, then log-in, then click add, then fill out the form, and finally it will be added. Adding Diigolet assures you do not even have to go to the website and through all of these steps to add a site and actually makes it so you are more likely to add your sites.
One of the best parts is that you can use tags to help organize all of your sites. I know I will organize mine by unit so that when it comes time to start planning all I will have to click on is Module B and then I will have a list of ideas for that unit all organized. Advisory ideas... Organized... Free Technology... Organized... Classroom Management... Organized... Well you should get the idea by now.
Now for the social part of social bookmarking. On Diigo there are groups of people that have common interests and together they create a list of great websites. You can then browse that groups collection of sites and add them to your own personal bookmark page. You can always create your own group and have the teachers at your school join and then share your sites together. I can see this being very useful with various departments within a school or even a district.
Diigo also has specific tools for teachers. You have to fill out a separate form for education and then you will receive the upgrade. I am planning on using the tools to organize annotated (Diigo also allows you to annotate pages you bookmarked) research for my students to look at for their final this semester. If you would like some more information about using Diigo specifically I have added another video below.
Bonus Teacher Tool: EDpuzzle
I have also used the help desk for a question about merging video (which they don't currently offer). The guy was so nice and helpful. He asked why I wanted to merge videos and then praised my genius ideas! He then offered other tools that could help me do what I wanted even though he was not tied to any of the other tools. He went above and beyond to help me resolve my problem even though it meant telling me his tool couldn't do what I wanted it too.
If you have any suggestions for what I should check out next please leave me a comment. I am always open to new ideas for the classroom.
Until next time...
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