#Digifoot12 -- Twitter for Professional Development -- Do I dare???

I'm the person at my school who is responsible for planning six hours of technology training for the certificated teachers in my building.  This is not an easy task considering the fact that there are many different levels of technology capability.  My one guiding principle is that I never want to waste their time.  I want to give them practical ideas that they feel that they can immediately use in their teaching.

I'm taking a MOOC (Massive Online Open Source Course) this summer and I'm starting to see that this is the way that professional development should be.  Teachers need to be willing to put in the effort to find something that targets what they are interested in or helps them with a deficit in their own teaching.  Part of being in a MOOC is communicating with others and finding ways to be inspired by them.

Kim Gill gave a great presentation how how she uses Twitter in her classroom and also in her own professional development.

I'm debating about whether I take part of my six precious hours of technology training to introduce Twitter as a Professional Development tool to my staff.  The pros are that they would become familiar with another social network that I don't think they give a great deal of credibility to. The con is that they may think that I'm wasting their time with something that they never plan on using.

IF I did decide to make it a part of our professional development time, here's some of the points that I would bring out...

1.  Demonstrating my Twitter account, who I follow, my followers, the hash tags that I often search on.
2. I would talk about my experience tweeting during a conference and during sessions.
3. I would impress upon them the fact that I'm not following twitter every day but when I want to see what other teacher-librarians are thinking about, I search on the #tlchat hash tag or I see what the many teacher-librarians that I follow are tweeting about.
4. I would encourage them to try out creating a Twitter account and look at the #edchat hash tag.
5. I would encourage them to try out some of these other educational hash tags that Cybrary Man has collected.
6. I would also encourage them to think about the many large changes coming to our district including the Common Core and how these National initiatives require us to look outside of our district.  The Common Core hash tag seems to be #ccchat.

If you comment on this message, let me know what you think?  Would you feel good about spending some professional development time learning about Twitter?

#DigiFoot12 Class -- Week 2 is on Twitter

Last week I started taking an awesome online course that is on "Digital Footprints."  I'm really excited about it because it is a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course).  This course is FREE and you get into it what you put into it.  And you don't have to go anywhere in order to meet up.  The course is using lots of aspects of social media to meet up, including Twitter, which is this week's focus. 

 

Here is my new Taxgedo on digital footprints.  I love Taxgedo and am thinking of having students create this digital footprint graphic that represents their digital footprint.

#DIGIFOOT12 WEEK TWO: TWITTER 


Kim Gill gave her Blackboard presentation.  I was really interested in discovering that she's a special education teacher for 4th, 5th and 6th and she does use Twitter with them! She has a Twitter account for her class and has them tweet from her iPads.  Her families then follow this Twitter account.   This is a good use of Twitter for students under thirteen.

For educational technology professional development, she does follow the #edchat hash tag and also the hash tag for events and conferences like #digifoot12.  

The after presentation Twitter chat included a mention of GroupTweet to make group tweeting easier.

Digital Footprints

Ahhh... summer.  Time for professional development if I can squeeze time away from my four-year-old who is also on break from preschool!  I'm taking part in two virtual courses.  The first started on Thursday and focuses on Digital Footprints.  Since I was not there for the actual Elluminate start of the class, I'm trying to ramp up by reading what everyone else wrote as well as getting access to all of the virtual places where people are meeting and talking.

The second course is on the gameification of the classroom as a part of 3D Game Labs. 

So here's the short list of all the places where this course seems to be taking place. 

• Student 2.0: This is a learning network where people can follow their personal learning interests.  Check out the badge below.

Visit Student 2.0

•  Mighty Bell: This is a place where people can post all kinds of information and people can comment and cheer about them.  The group is collecting artifacts there.   
• WordPress site :  This has all of the information about the course. 
• Wikispaces:  More resources here
• Twitter:  #digifoot12 and @digifoot12
• Pinterest: I made a Digital Footprint board 

 The course has a very large digital footprint as you can see.  


My big fun find is What About Me by Intel. 

 

 What About Me from Intel This online tool accesses your Facebook account and creates an infographic for you to consider.  It tags the words on your wall and assigns them to different categories.  What I discovered about myself is not surprising.  I use Facebook primarily for keeping connected to family and old friends and mainly share information about my travels with them.  So the infographic shows that 20% of what I talk about is travel (red). 

I could see using this with students who Facebook as a way to start a discussion on what they put out there for their friends to see.  

Tammy Worcester!

My school district invited Tammy Worcester to present on our island as a part of our STEM initiative.  She has all of these great Tech Tips that I'm really looking forward to reading further.

Here's the new stuff for me.


Google Search tricks

• Use Google as a calculator.  It even does the correct order of operations. 
• And as a conversion tool.  The key is to use the word "IN".  "As in 100 dollars in euros." 
• And also using the word "Define" in front of any word will pull up the definition.  Sometimes there are pronunciations in there as well. 
• When using Google Chrome, there is a a microphone on the right hand side of the search box.  You can click on this microphone icon to speak your search query. 
• There are also now filtering by reading level if you look on the right for "More Search Tools." 

Blogger tricks. 

• You can e-mail posts to your Blog by setting up this capability under the Settings Tab. This is cool for sending photos from your phone directly to your blog. 
• Adding Audio to your blog.  Vocaroo.com is a Web site that allows you to record your voice and embed it.  Record MP3.org will allow you to link to an audio file.  Vocaroo allows people to embed the audio into the blog.  RecordMP3 links to it. 

Google Docs

• Within Google Docs, you can use the "Research" functionality.  This is in the tools menu.  It puts a left hand bar that allows you to research and cite information directly.  This is interesting and also TERRIBLY SCARY!!! To my mind, I'm happy to see that it will make it even easier for kids to cite sources.  But it also means that they will only be using the free Web to find stuff.   Once they become comfortable with this interface, will they ever be willing to go deeper with resources that are NOT available on the free Web?