Eman's EdTech Corner: June 2017

Saturday, June 10, 2017

My first Twitter Chat

So, as with started to use Twitter again, this whole Twitter just was making me nervous and I kept putting it off. I logged on and decided to join the 3:00 pm #edumatch chat and see what it was all about. I have to say it was a very pleasant experience. Very much like a chatroom discussion or even a discussion board. Fortunately, the Twitter chat was better.

I had read the previous assignments and teacher’s posting about Twitter and decided to use TweetDeck to make the Twitter chat experience better. I was lead to the chat via the Google link that was posted in under this week’s Twitter Chats and Hashtags document and joined my session. It definitely made the process easier to view and participate in. I had one window with the TweetDeck open and as recommended by Alice Keeler on her article, I opened one column for the hashtag and another for the moderator. On another browser I had my Twitter window open. This made the switching back and forth super easy for me. I saw the participants, moderator and my Twitter account all at once without having to move pages.

Participating really help close the gap I was having in regards to using Twitter. Chapter 3 of What Connected Educators do Differently goes into detail about embracing the Three Cs and it was very prevalent in this exercise. Having the limited 140 characters makes communicating with a purpose a must. There wasn’t room for me to add unnecessary information. I quickly picked up on the acceptable lingo others were using (Ts=teachers, Ss=students, ppl=people). Small details such as that kept all the answers short and simple.

Reading Alice’s article also helped because I was able to connect the dots to what she gave as advice and what I was doing/tweeting. She recommended logging in early and being ready. I jumped right in with my responses and giving feedback to others in the conversation. I even came across a current classmate joining in on the fun. This could be a fantastic way to have a “silent conversation” as an activity in class. I felt like the discussion was normal. The moderator posted the “Qs” and I responded with the “As”. I noticed how it threw off the flow when some responded without referencing which question they were answering.

To end this, the best takeaway I had from this was what Whitaker writes in chapter 3. Collaboration with passion is integral to successful teams. While answering the questions, every bit of feedback was positive. I saw when people liked my tweets and it gave me encouragement to tweetchat more. And when the moderator retweeted one of mine, it was as if a teacher thanked me in the classroom. This same activity can be used in the classroom. Looking around at more hashtags, the connections to other professionals can go on forever.

Using Labels and Curating Tools

Link to my site and the curation tool.

Link to my blog using labels. It is on the right hand column above my Twitter feed. Or on my website on the Blog tab in the same location.

This assignment ending up being very helpful. The curation tool I used is Clipix. It is a version of Pinterest pretty much. I see it as a more professional option you can say. That is just my opinion. The idea is the same in that you find sites or images you like, you take a picture of the site or a link and load it to a clipboard which it organized however you like. The pros in using a curating tool for a website is that it lets you update your clipboard whenever you like which reflects on the link you have shared or have posted on your personal site. It is great for researching and a "dump all" when you just want to quickly organize links to come back to at a later time.

Using Clipix along with the labeling tool on my blog will definitely help users get to the information they want to more efficiently. I did not even think about that when I originally started my blog and just added a few labels and I can see the advantage to it immediately. I will have to dedicate more time to creating and adjusting labels as time goes on, but it just takes about 30 seconds to add a new label to an existing post.

Sunday, June 4, 2017

Tutorial Link for Embedding Blogger