Twitter Lessons Today

Today was a snow day. It could have been a day to sleep and forget about school but we have this wonderful technology integrator in our district that gets us all excited about things. Today she held an Elluminate session for the teachers about Twitter. I have been on Twitter for a very long time but I went to the session so I could be moral support. It turns out that Kathy Schrock also held a Twitter session today at FETC. I was hoping that her session was going to be streamed and sent her a message on Twitter to post the link to the stream. It was not streamed but Kathy sent me a message with links to her resources. A teacher/librarian's dream! Now I can spend the rest of the week clicking and learning! Oh, and on Kathy's page she has a Youtube video from one of my mentors, Jim Gates... here is Twitter in 60 Seconds. Oh, I also follow Jim on Twitter!


Join Twitter and start your own Personal Learning Network (PLN). Oh, and it is very cool that someone as famous as Kathy Schrock, who I learned about in library school, took the time to send me a message on Twitter with her links. Librarians are just like that, we share, share, share! Here is a link to Kathy Schrock's blog! Enjoy! :-)

Wes Fryer's Blog Caught My Eye Today, December 5, 2010

I have been checking out Wes Fryer's pictures on Flickr the last few days. He has been in Maine checking out some very inquiry driven classrooms. He has been posting the pictures and telling us all about his trip on Plurk. Actually, he has not been on Plurk much lately but has been feeding Plurk through his Twitter stream and with TwitPics of his visit. He wrote about one elementary classroom in the blog post: Be Kind, Do your Best and be a Voracious Reader. He also wrote about Alice Barr's classroom and her 21st Century Tool Kit. Alice is someone we both follow on Twitter.

Plurk This, Twitter!

I was very happy and surprised this week when I saw that Miguel Guhlin had become a fan of mine on Plurk. We follow each other on Twitter but I just recently pulled my Plurk friend request from Miguel thinking he had given up completely on Plurk. But enter Kevin Honeycutt and his presentation at TEC-SIG (Texas Computer Education Association’s conference). KevinH is my friend on Plurk. He is everyone’s friend (everyone in my PLN is a teacher or in the education field). I have never met KevinH in real life but he has met many of the people I personally know on Plurk. KevinH is a Plurk Evangelist. He speaks at many conferences and always promotes the Professional Learning Network that I am part of on Plurk. He is one of the people I ask when I need technology help. Check out Miguel’s recent blog post:

Plurk This, Twitter!

I agree with Miguel, my network on Twitter was bigger too but I was missing the personal threaded type discussions. For me it was always hit or miss on Twitter. I was on Twitter almost from the beginning and I was following so many non-educators that I was getting bogged down, then the marketers started spamming, and celebrities started racing to get the most followers. The more popular Twitter became the more I lost interest. I started to Plurk in 2008 but was not real active until a couple of educators introduced me around in their PLNs, and that was all I needed. The number of people I follow on Plurk is still not as large as those I follow on Twitter and Twitter is still my network of choice during conferences (gotta love the backchanneling that goes on at conferences) but my contacts seem more like relationships on Plurk and my Plurk PLN rocks!

How to recognize secure websites...

Lee Lefever has done it again. He and his Common Craft website are wonderful for teaching us how to do things on the Internet. His newest is called "Secure Websites in Plain English." It's great! Everythng you need to know before shopping online! You can follow Lee Lefever on Twitter too.

Visual Blooms

I stumbled upon this Web2.0 App digital-visual representation of Blooms Taxonomy through a twitter tweet but it took a while to find the actual wiki it came from. This represents the levels of blooms that are hit with different web apps. If I want my students to work create, evaluate, analyze, and apply their learning. I must offer them some higher-level web apps. Some of these very web apps may be blocked by filters or considered unsafe or unreliable as sources. It is time for those of us in the library to step up and teach Internet Safety, find ways to get student accounts without the need for student e-mail addresses, teach website evaluation, teach how to properly use social networking with proper netiquette so that our students can use these web apps responsibly. Can I get a “woot” from school librarians? I don’t know about you but I want my students using Google Docs and collaborating on wikis. I want my student to blog about their research projects, to make voki books reviews, and put their digital photographs (notice I did not say pictures of themselves) up on web services like Flickr and Picassa. Come join me school librarians and let’s make digital blooms a library initiative in this new school year!

TwitterMosaic

So I was on twitter today and someone posted a link for twitterMosaic. I of course had to check it out. My twitterMosaic is below. You can get your own and can get a snapshot of your friends and followers on twitter!

Get your twitter mosaic here.