Create the space for dialogue
Pete and Chris, an assistant head teacher and a newly qualified teacher, enjoyed sharing ideas for learning with me. But it was when I showed them Twitter and where to find future ideas that they saw the potential of online networks.
Give a teacher an idea and you spark an interest for a week. Lead a teacher to a community and they will have ideas for a lifetime.
One of the issues with using Twitter is dealing with the huge number of useful links that stream through every day. Delicious has always been the way I organise my bookmarks but I want to bookmark so many sites that I could spend all day manually adding them.
Even with the little Delicious bookmarklet the work-flow of saving links from Twitter was so time consuming that I stopped doing it. However recently I have found a solution that automatically saves links from Twitter – this has revitalised my use of Delicious and means I can bookmark whilst using Twitter.
This little application looks at your own Tweets and saves anything with links as Delicious bookmarks. To set it up it is just a case of linking the two accounts (Delicious+Twitter). A BETA app by Marc Mims I have found this to be a brilliant and simple way to store links. Here are some features that make it so useful:
Here is how the process looks, first a tweet:
Here is the corresponding tweet automatically saved as a Delicious bookmark,
Packrati.us was easy to setup and it quietly gets on with saving my bookmarks whilst I use Twitter. It has been exactly the sort of little application that I have been looking for to integrate my use of these two great services.
I have also found ReadTwit, from Lionite, useful to snag links from all of the people I follow on Twitter into an RSS reader.
Readtwit filters your twitter feed to links only, resolves link destinations and publishes the content as an RSS feed. You can then use any feed reading software / service to read twitter posted content along with the rest of your feeds.
The feed is pretty busy so I mainly use it for data-mining and searching for interesting resources or if I have something specific in mind. I find it less useful than Packrati.us though because I have less control over what appears there.
With Packrati.us I can choose exactly what I want to save and tag it too, it is Twitter bookmarking. If you are like me there was always links that I thought useful, never saved them and then cursed the fact as I desperately tried to find them later. Perhaps those days are over.
What processes or application do you currently use to save links from Twitter? Can you recommend any other tools that facilitates this process?
Doug Belshaw and Stuart Ridout were instrumental in the production of the fantastic #movemeon book,
“Tips, ideas and suggestions for all teachers from the Twitter community.”
The book was created from the tweets of fellow Twitter users, all collated with the #movemeon hashtag.
Another effort was soon started after this one titled #newleaders. I will soon be one of these new leaders and so this week I asked Stuart Ridout if we could give it a fresh look.
The tag has gained momentum over the last few days with hundreds of tips and ideas suggested about school leadership.
You can see all the tweets here at TwapperKeeper.
For the first book it took over 300 individual ideas, tweeted with the tag, to produce the book.
This is the edu-Twitter community press!
Crowd-sourcing the sort of professional development advice we need. The power of this sort of advice is in the origin: our peers.
I have no doubt that in time other topics will emerge we can contribute to. If each of us makes a single 140 character contribution we can achieve so much together as a community.
Please help with this new book by writing a tweet with your leadership advice and don’t forget the hashtag…
#newleaders
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When you share your classroom experiences and ideas, one thing you hope for is that they are transferable to other classrooms. This week I was delighted to see three examples of my ideas being successfully applied elsewhere.
The first is from Peter Richardson a primary school teacher in Preston who took my idea for using Voicethread for peer assessment of writing and used it for work in their Egyptian work. Here is the Voicethread he shared.
Kevin McLaughlin is a Year 4 teacher in Leicester and after reading my blog post about using Twitter and Google Forms for a data handling lesson, has applied the same ideas himself. His class compared music tastes from Kevin’s Twitter network (via a Google Form) with their own. I am pleased it worked well for his Year 4 class too, as Kevin explains,
The data that we now have will be used next week in further Maths lessons and the children added that they will continue to use the survey over the weekend at home and with friends. Real data from real people. This is what makes this type of investigation so very useful and brings an added dimension to data collection activities.
The final ripple I caused comes from Jan Webb another Year 4 teacher in Cheshire. Jan took up the challenge of using my Maths Maps idea with her class and developed a series of activities in a Google Map of Berlin for her class to use.
View Berlin in a larger map
Jan explains on her blog how they enjoyed using the resource in her class.
…a great deal of discussion arose from finding the shapes in some of the buildings and finding how many rectangles we could see in a building! We all really enjoyed these tasks and they not only let us discuss aspects of shape, but also provoked discussions about aspects of life in Germany.
These ripples are very encouraging as you are able to clearly see the effect sharing your own practice has on other teachers and subsequently other children’s learning.
If you have always thought about starting a blog but never got round to it, why not give it a go. The more pebbles in the pond causing ripples the better.
Over the next two weeks in our year 5 class we will be exploring data investigation and the tools with which we can use to undertake them. The first three days of this week we will be looking at some technology that can enhance data handling and make our life easier. In today’s session we learned about Google Forms and I demonstrated how they work with the help of my Twitter network.
We wanted to achieve three things from our maths session today
After placing the lesson in the context you see in the first paragraph, I began the session by explaining that I was going to use my Twitter network to help demonstrate how we can use Google Forms to collect data.
I spent some time with the class going through the process of creating a Form from the Google Docs home screen and then adding my questions and running through the different types of questions you can use. We talked a lot about how this type of data collection is only good for some occasions and a pencil and paper method can still be the best way. It is a matter of choosing the most appropriate.
The class would be making a simple favourites or preference type survey and so our shared one was similar. You can see it embedded in the post below.
Once complete, I sent out the link to this to my Twitter network (Look at the bottom of the Form edit page for the link – I used bit.ly to shorten it for Twitter, more on that later!) I did this because I wanted the children to see data being added, I wanted to demonstrate the moment of data submission from the Google Form. This also helps the children see how a spreadsheet is linked to the form. (15 minutes)
We switched to the spreadsheet and the children thought it was rather magical as the responses started to drop into the cells as we watched. I reminded them that as soon as someone clicks SUBMIT we were seeing the result.
The children then worked in groups of three with a single laptop (2 groups per table) – one of the children signed into their Google Docs (part of Google Apps for Education) account and created their own “Favourites” Google Form. To keep the children focused I asked them to only give 5 choices for their questions otherwise they tend to get longwinded and only create one or two questions. (15 minutes)
One of the useful things about writing up lesson experiences on my blog is that it is wonderful to go back and look at what I learned and make adjustments to lessons. With some of these things in mind, once the groups had made their Forms, rather than share via email etc (this just adds a complication) we clicked on the Live Form link at the foot of the page.
So everyone had on their laptop screens their form and I asked them to simply change places with those on their table and complete each others’ surveys. They then moved around the classroom adding their responses to other forms from other groups. Although it is nice to share via email, in my experience of working with Google Forms and lots of children it is much easier to move the children rather than share the Form. The children certainly got more responses this way and contributed more, there was less in the way.
After each child had submitted their responses they clicked on the Go Back to the form link which reset the form for the next child – this worked out really well. (15 minutes)
Up to this point the children were able to appreciate how Google Forms is a great way to gather information and how it organises it for us in the spreadsheet.
Back at their own Google Form the children spent some time exploring the results Summary page to look at how their data can be represented. (5 minutes)
As a class we returned to our Edu Favourites survey of educators in my Twitter network. By the end of my second session we had over 125 responses and it was a great pool of data to explore. Real data from real people that we literally witnessed being entered. I was able to ask children lots of questions from how it was represented. It proved to be a great plenary. Here are the results from the survey, there are currently 170 responses – thankyou if you were one of them. (5 minutes)
As a final exploration of this whole process you could explore the link data. I used bit.ly to shorten the long Google Form URL. bit.ly provides traffic data, with a free account, and you can show the class where the people clicking on the form are from. Currently there have been 269 clicks on the Edu Favourites form link and here is where everyone is from.
You could even do some work on how many didn’t fill in the form and compare it to those who did.
Thankyou for taking the time to help with our maths lesson today, I am always so grateful for your contributions – and some of you have even gone away wondering what Marmite is – life will never be the same again. By the way I hate it too!
