Tag Archives: pln

Apr 17 2009

Twitter Useful for Education?

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YES, Absolutely!

I have been using Twitter; for professional and personal reasons since the summer of 2007. I currently follow 579 people, 750 people follow me and I’ve had almost 4,000 updates (3,946 right now to be exact!). I use Twitter, mostly, to tap the collective brains of the people in my network and to also provide them resources and glimpses into my life as an Instructional Technology Specialist. When I have a question, I ask it on Twitter and get a response (or 10 or more!) within SECONDS. When I’m doing something cool with students and teachers, I post it on Twitter and often solicit questions. When I’ve found a really cool resource, I share it on Twitter for my network to benefit from.

So, what is Twitter exactly? Well, at the very basic level, Twitter users answer the question, “What are you doing?” But, as explained above, it can be much much more than that. In my opinion, Twitter IS the people you follow and the people who follow you – your Personal Learning Network. Someone who joins Twitter and only has 5 followers and only follows 5 people will NOT, in my opinion, get the most out of Twitter. You need to build your network to allow for the magic to happen. Start by following a few people (you can follow me:diannekrause :), then see who they follow, and start following a few of them. Eventually people will start following you and you can then decide whether you want to follow them back or not. The glory is that you have total control who is in your network, at all times.

Of course, Twitter can also be a huge time suck if you allow it to be. No, I do not read ALL the Tweets (that’s what individual messages are called) that come through my account, but I do read the Tweets from the people in my most immediate Personal Learning Network – mostly educators and people like me from Pennsylvania. To help out in the organization of all this information and status updates, I use a 3rd party application called TweetDeck; to separate all the Tweets out into groups of my choosing. There are many such applications out there so you do not have to always navigate to Twitter.com to read your Tweets.

So, is there a place for Twitter in education? YES! Check out these resources to see how, and how you can get started with Twitter yourself. Any questions? Please don’t hesitate to ask!

Check out this cool presentation…


See you on Twitter, hopefully!!

Aug 19 2008

What to do when you can’t be there

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My district is running 3 training workshops this week for the teachers who have eClassrooms – Smartboard, Macbook, speakers, cameras, wireless internet. Yesterday we trained the teachers who are just getting their boards this year. Today we are training the teachers who got them last year (with the newbies invited too), and tomorrow we are hosting a “potpourri” of multimedia tools for their eClassrooms.

I am not the main trainer for yesterday and today’s sessions, but I was there to introduce the session, our new Professional Learning Network, and to be around in case of emergency (Smartboards are finicky with Macs sometimes :P) Anyways, yesterday went great and I was all geared up to go in today and have a fantastic day.

Then the puking began. Not mine, my 5 year old son’s. At 10:30 pm, fever of 103.5 (yikes!) and ruined bed. Needless to say, I pretty much knew I wasn’t going to work today. Which really bothered me because I was always one of those teachers who felt that they couldn’t NOT be in school because I had to teach my students and I was doing them a disservice to leave them busy work with a sub. I feel even more strongly now that I’m teaching adults. They are giving their time to be there voluntarily, I should be there to teach them.

So, today, I made my first Ustream recording to do the Ning network introduction. It’s not great because I recorded it at 7 am or so, and the quality is really bad when you blow it up. My intention was for the trainers to show the video on the Smartboard, but I also advised them to have the participants watch it on their macbooks.

So here it is, my very first Ustream recorded show and an introduction to our Professional Learning Network!

Live video chat by Ustream