Twitter After Time

Twitter to me has been an experience. First off I never really wanted to Twitter. I only saw Twitter as a way to update others on my life, which isn't all that exciting and I couldn't figure out why anyone would really care about what I ate for lunch or what I was doing on a Thursday night. However, some of my views of Twitter have changed. First off I realize that it's not just for creating a storyline of my life. I don't have to post every twenty minutes what I'm up to. Second I didn't think I wanted to follow other people's lives that closely either. But now I know that Twitter is for more than just that. I found out that I can search to follow items of interest to me. I enjoy personally following ESPN and getting updates on the sports world. I also can follow educational websites such as EdWeek, Discovery Educator and TopEdTweets to stay up to date on educational news. Once I found these people to follow I warmed up to the idea of Twitter. I'm still not completely hooked I refuse to put it on my phone as I'm just not ready to submerse myself that deeply into the Twitter lifestyle. However, I have gotten my feet wet and maybe someday I will find a reason to dive in. Until now I will keep searching until I do.

My Personal Learning Network

As the internet becomes more and more popular the world becomes a smaller place. Before the telephone was invented a person had to send a letter, which could take days, months or even years to reach their intended receiver. After the telephone a person could call up a friend and chat. But now the internet has brought people closer together than ever. When I was younger I used to watch cartoons with video phones in them and think how cool it would be to be able to see someone while you talked to them, well now that is possible. This small new world idea is true when discussing education as well. A person can form a personal learning network online to bring important information to them. Setting up a personal learning network is an easy way for a person to have information come to them instead of having to search it out on their own.

To set up a personal learning network one must first determine what kind of information they are looking for. As a teacher I would want to look for other teacher networks to find the information that would be important to me. A good suggestion would be to join a social network geared towards teachers. This can be a starting ground for your personal learning network. The second suggestion I would make would be to do an educational blog search in Google, or some other search engine, so that you can start following others with similar interests as you. Once you have found some blogs of interest to you a good idea would be to subscribe to a reader. An easy way to set up a reader would be to get a Google account and use the reader in there as it is very easy to use. Once you have a reader set up you can subscribe to specific blogs in it. This is helpful because in a reader new information comes to you instead of you having to continuously check back on the webpage for new posts.

One of the most important steps to having a personal learning network is participation. A user must immerse themselves into the websites that they follow not only reading them but by leaving comments and using the materials gained. I believe a goal of a personal learning network should be to gain information from others and then in return to leave your information. Starting small with a blog is suggested and then moving into a micro-blog site such as Twitter would help to deepen your participation.

I will continue to use some of the websites that we explored in this class while others although important to learn about may not get used as much in my future. In this class I created this blog site that I am currently posting on. This website gave me an outlet to learn and give my opinions on Web 2.0 tools. In addition it was a way for me to connect with other teachers. I will continue to use this blog, but I am not yet sure in what form.

In this class we also learned about a website called VoiceThread, which I immediately enjoyed. VoiceThread could be compared to online PowerPoints except there is an option to comment on the slides by others either by typing, talking, or a video. I even made one of my own with a class of mine. Many of my students get very nervous when doing presentations or speeches so I decided to let them do theirs on here. I got great results and the students were more willing to talk and present additional materials this way. I do plan on using this website again for future projects.

The next Web 2.0 tool that we looked at was Google. I guess before this class I knew Google was great but I discovered a whole new side to it. This could not have come at a better time as my district is currently changing over from Groupwise to Google email accounts. I learned how to use many of the icons on my Blackberry that I up until now ignored because I did not want to figure them out. Now that I have I actually use my phone for what it was meant for, not just a way to surf the net and text my friends but it is now actually a Smartphone to me. Google has some great extra perks to having an account such as my blog, my reader and Google Documents. I will be using these in the future. I already mentioned my blog. My reader is a way to get information from websites that I subscribe to without having to go to the website and check for updates. This has saved me time and I will continue using this. I will also continue to use Google Docs. The Word and PowerPoint features in here work great with the added bonus of being a collaborative workspace. I can share a document with a co-worker, they can add their information to it without me having to go back in and re-save it. I will continue this use as it is easy to use and saves time.

Delicious is one of my favorite websites that we were introduced to. This is an online bookmarking website. I can put my favorite websites into here and it will tag and save them for me. I will always use this website. This would work for bookmarking pages that I want to use with and for my students, as well as sorting research materials and personal items. It is easy to tag the websites so that I know why I found the website important and I can easily find it later when I need to use it again.

Skype and Elluminate are both ways to make phone calls or hold video conferences. These were new to me in the sense that I have only used sites such as these socially so I was introduced to a new way to use them. I do not know if I will get an opportunity to use these in my classrooms. However, I will continue using them socially, and if I can find the appropriate place for them in my professional life I will incorporate them.

Twitter is the final website that was used in great depth in this class. Twitter is a micro-blogging website. Its users can leave short messages that range from what they are doing at that moment to a new education bill that was passed. At first I was very anti Twitter, I thought it was for people that needed a hobby. However, after exploring it more I have seen the professional and personal benefits of Twitter. I’m still not sure of how I feel about posting on a regular basis, but I do like following other’s posts to keep up with educational and sports related information.

I do believe developing a personal learning network is important. Once I discovered these Web 2.0 tools I realized how much easier maneuvering the internet could be. Information found in a web search can be overwhelming and many of these websites help to better find and organize this information. Also teaching should be about sharing ideas and these tools all make sharing information easier for everyone. I would suggest everyone start their own personal learning network. Start out small and slowly grow your network. Even after this class I do not believe my network is complete, I believe it has just begun and I can’t wait to see where it will take me.

A Fun Story from 5/6

I had a student stop by yesterday to tell me about all the cool stuff she learned the previous night. She was talking to a friend on Twitter, one that she had met on Twitter because they had so many things in common. The friend asked if she had Skype and she said yes so they decided to Skype with one another. Both of the girls are high school aged (18) but the other girl is from England. My student was so excited to tell me everything she learned about England, what words they use, how their schools work, cultural differences and so on. Just wanted to share this real work experience that one of my students had with all of you. Thought this might help for any of you that are trying to convince your administration that the internet can be both entertaining and educational.

Delicious Reflection

Delicious is a social bookmarking website that helps to organize, store and share bookmarked websites. The way the website work is as follows. Users can bookmark websites that they have found useful to them. They then can “tag” the website through the use of a descriptive name that organizes the website into groups. After a user tags a website it is put into a category with other websites with a similar tag. This is helpful to other users because they can then see other websites of similar interest to them.

When I go back and look at the current websites tagged by my classmates under the tags “uwwlibmedia” and “web2.0” I notice some new websites that look interesting to me. If I went through and looked at every website tagged by my classmates I would be on the internet for days straight. However, I see the fact that I can search tagged materials as a perk to this website. Even if I do not save every website suggested by my classmates I can search the tag at a later time when I am looking for something more specific and use my classmate’s suggestions to guide my search.

When I first started hearing about “tags” I was not really sure how I felt about them. I didn’t fully understand their uses, even in my blog now I am not always sure what to tag my blogs as. However, I didn’t start to understand tagging until I became familiar with delicious. My use of tagging is still growing, but I do understand that a tag is a way to sort materials (websites) into categories, kind of like I would a file cabinet, only with more information that fills much less space. I did for a while have a problem with tagging my websites as I did not realize how sensitive tagging can be. If I capitalized a letter in one tag and not in the other it would make a separate folder for that website. Tags do not leave room for human error they always assume I am right because the internet cannot read my mind. As I have become more familiar with tagging I have started to use multiple tags for the same website, although that is still am immerging skill for me. I did find that how others tagged a website impacted my tag of that website, if I agreed with the tag I would use it, if I didn’t think that was the right tag I would not include it when I saved a site. If I was going to teach my students how to understand and use tags, I would start off by talking about organization. Many of my students need better organizational skills so starting with a visual of how to organize lockers and backpacks would be best. After explaining how folders separate our materials in our lockers I would move on to illustrate how tags are the equivalent of a folder for our online lockers.

Tag bundles are a way for a user to in a sense tag their tags. I have not used a tag bundle yet, as I am still new to tagging and delicious. However, I could see as time when on and I really utilized delicious to its full potential that this would be a helpful tool. At the same time this almost seems like overkill. Tagging tags almost seems as though a person needs to work on their organizational skills, however, without the proper background I am not sure if this statement would hold true for me over time.

A tag cloud is a visual picture of a user’s tags. This “cloud” is all the user’s tags arranged in a cloud shape that has the more popular tags bolded while the less used ones are usually smaller and not bold. My tag cloud is currently small. It includes the required tags for this class and also tags that include websites I found helpful for math classes as well as some that I tagged for personal reasons or that would be useful to me as a coach.

An annotation is the ability to add a detail or a description to a tagged website. I did not add many annotations to websites that I tagged. The main reason for this was because most of the titles of the websites were descriptive enough. However, when searching websites I have found that when others added this the websites they were more useful to me and I appreciated that information being there.
Delicious is a great way to connect with others that have similar interests to me. Each time I tag a website it shows me how many others have tagged that same site. If I click on this I can see all of them and read what tags they are using. If I see a person tags many websites that I am interested in I can follow them and see what else they come up with. I found a user by the name of lucasjw that had many tags of interest to me so I have started following him as a result. I have coworkers that have started using similar websites such as Diigo. We discussed the uses and decided to add one another. This is nice as we work in a large school and sometimes sharing information and useful tools is hard to do, so this has made our building a little smaller.

I have seen Diigo used in the reading classes at my school. The students can read materials and do the work directly on the computer. This saves time, paper, and improves student motivation. I feel luck in that I have an administration that supports the use of many of these tools. We have the resources; computers, internet access, and trained staff to do so, so using these assets to their full advantage is a district wide goal.

Trying New Things

This week I looked at some new Web 2.0 tools. I explored VoIP, GoogleEarth and LinkeIn. All of these were in a way new to me. VoIP or Voice Over Internet Protocol as they are known as is similar to using the phone but it is over the internet. I was familiar with Skype but not many of the others such as Oovoo or Tokbox. These websites are interesting and I actually have found that often people that do not enjoy talking on the phone enjoy using Skype because they can do more things such as show the person they are talking to items that are on their end.I could see myself using this in school for IEP meetings. Many times parents can not always make it in to an IEP meeting and they ask to attend via the telephone. If they have internet I could see Skype being more useful during a meeting so that parents can put names and faces together as well as the teachers can see the parents. The second tool that I looked at was GoogleEarth. This is a map that shows the earth, as it really looks. A student could be in class learning about a place and then go online and actually see the place. Finally I looked at LinkedIn. This website is thought of as a professional network. They're mission is to connect all the worlds professionals and in the end make them more successful because of these connections. I could see this website being useful in school to show student the importance of being connected to others. Also it could be used to help students understand what is important for them to do to reach their future goals in life. If they want to become a police officer they could connect with other police officers and talk to them about what they feel is important for the student to focus on now while they are still in school.

Using Twitter

Twitter is a social networking and blogging website that allows a user to make a post up to 140 characters long, similar to the length of a text message. This website is used by many to post what they are up to or things that they have found of interest to them. I have in the past tried to stay away from websites such as twitter because, if I got too into it, I could see it consuming my life. Twitter also makes it convenient to post by allowing users to post via text message from their phone, so the user is always able to access their profile to post. Personally, I could use this to see what friends are up to or if I wanted to keep up on Hollywood drama. Professionally, I can follow educationally relevant users to see new information that they share. With my students, I am not so sure I would want to use this with them. I do not believe I want them to know this much about my life and in return I do not want to know this much about theirs. However, I could see the use of the 140 character maximum in reading and summarizing materials. Many students do not know how to summarize so the small space would require them to pick out the most important information and not copy word for word from a book. So, while I enjoy the idea I do not know if I would specifically want to use the Twitter website. Twitter does have an educational website, www.twiducate.com that works in the same way that would be more teacher user friendly in my opinion, but there isn't the same easy access to it.

Technology-Transformed Learning Environments

David Warlick recently posted a message on his blog 2 Cents Worth about how technology is transforming learning. He specifically discusses what the learning environment should look like. He feels that learning should be question based in the sense that students ask questions when they run into a road block and then search for the answers. This kind of learning should cause students to have conversations with one another, their teachers, or beyond such as experts in the field. The learning that takes place depends on how the learner responds as long as it is authentic and relevant. The learning could then be considered more valuable and the learner must then make a personal investment. Warlick also used a great example with video games. A learner should be free to make mistakes much like a person playing a video game does. Each time a person plays a video game they make a mistake in different places that they will learn from for the next time and hopefully not make again.
The most prevalent point made in the post, to me, was the idea of safely making mistakes. As technology is so much faster and much more advanced then the old paper and pencil approach, mistakes are much easier to fix then they ever were in the past. It is so important for students to make mistakes so that they can learn from them. In so many other areas of their lives mistakes help them learn and move forward so we need to have that same thinking in education.