Month: January 2009

5 Things To Get Your Twitter Network Off The Ground

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Just recently I have been advising some visiting colleagues about the benefits of using Twitter as the main protagonist in the story of my learning network. I wish I had such a resource when I was starting out into the world of educational technology or whilst I was training. After showing people how the network interacts, I recently tweeted that it makes you realise the potential expertise that you can be effortlessly connected to.

As I have recently helped a few people begin their network with Twitter I thought I would write about a few ideas to help get started and to make the most of Twitter for teachers.

  1. Profile – for me that is the first port of call for finding out about anyone. I look for involvement with education and teaching. So make sure that your profile, including a picture, is well updated as it helps others who might be looking to connect with you.
  2. Get started straight away – profile sorted, now just get started. Write about how your lessons have gone, a great website you have used today (add the link, everyone loves looking at new web resources), a good digital camera you have in school, problems with your network, revelations from your pupils. Anything really, just make a start.
  3. Follow a bunch of people – for me Twitter is all about making connections with fellow teachers and colleagues in education, so find someone you know or whose blog you may have enjoyed reading for a while and explore who they follow and who follows them. (Look at the Lists they have created too)
  4. Get someone with a big network to put a shoutout for you – give your network a kickstart by asking someone with a whole heap of followers to put in a good word for you. Piggybacking in this way will open up more networks for you to explore and teachers to follow. Just be sure to follow back those that have followed you if you are happy to.
  5. Begin replying to people – along with putting the word out about yourself and your own practice/situation engage with people directly by replying (@ before their username – everyone sees these) and direct messaging (D before their username – private). If you can help or offer advice of your own then do so where you can. It might be you askign for advice/help in the future.

One more thing to remember is that in the early days of Twitter use it can be very quiet, few replies, not much going on in terms of conversation. Do not be discouraged – try to perservere and stick it out and keep using it, as soon there will be a “tipping point” when the connections you have made reap a bountiful information harvest.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of ideas for new users, but will help to maybe get your network off the ground. What are your best pieces of advice for new users of Twitter?

January Visitors

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Over the last 2 weeks I have hosted visits to our school from a couple of ICT coordinators from primary schools in the region. 

In the first visit of the year we spent time discussing the process of the ICT Mark, a national accreditation for technology in schools, and how it can help become a diagnostic tool for curriculum development. My school completed the ICT Mark back in 2006. Alongside discussing how to get the most out of the process for technology in the school, I explained how we have used the whole diagnostic process to help plan and implement subject development across the other curriculum areas. It has proven extremely valuable in our school and is now part of the whole school development plan.
Ready for another session
The second visit took place yesterday, in which I welcomed an ICT coordinator exploring the concept of mobile technology. They are to be moving to a large scale new build in a few years and so will implementing laptops in the classroom. It sounded like they have already had some success with them in their current setting but was looking for more inspiration on the practical uses of the technology in primary.

I spoke about how the vision of “choice” that we have is at the heart of decisions we make in terms of technology and how the resource must be owned by the children. They saw the children working on their morning activities, in which they have a specific group, table and independt activity to work at first thing in the morning. This allows them to get straight on when they walk in the classroom – engaging them in class immediately. We do this for half an hour most days and it has proven very successful to making a good start to the day. The children access a range of activities on the laptops as well as away from them too.

I taught a maths lesson in which we were developing our understanding of nets of cubes and exploring the various ways we could make them. I decided not to use the laptops as the children needed hands on experience of using Clixi to make them. I stressed that the sense of a blended learning environment was important to me and so the decisions to put them away were just as important.

On both visits I ended up speaking about Twitter! Both ICT coordinators were not members of any sort of community of fellow practitioners that could help and support them in their work. I could not help but recommend the education technology Twitter network as a great source of support, friendship, inspiration and connections. I took some time to demonstrate Twitter by giving a shoutout (as some of you may recall) and was grateful as ever of the wonderful response received from people.

Face to face meetings with colleagues are always great and I feel privileged to be in a position to offer some support, help and encouragement to visitors to my classroom. I hope in their short time with us I did just that.

Teachers TV – Online Collaborative Tools

My class, VoicethreadPublished onUpdated on3 Comments on Teachers TV – Online Collaborative Tools

C2984002I have been fortunate enough to be part of a Teachers TV programme recently aired entitled “ICT for the Non-Specialist – Blogs/Wikis”.

However the part that we were filmed about did not include anything to do with a wiki – what we did showcase was TutPup, Voicethread and Google Docs. We are in the second half of the film.

The programme synopsis is included here 

The use of blogs and online collaboration in education is explored as teachers discover how and why they should make good use of them.

Head of geography at Bury Church Secondary, Sally Sumner, uses blogs as a resource in the classroom and as a revision tool, having overcome her initial doubts about her ICT skills.

MFL teacher Janet McCann finds blogging invaluable for motivating the boys in her class, and discusses why the pupils find this technology so engaging.

At Priestsic Primary School, Nottinghamshire, ICT co-ordinator Tom Barrett uses online collaboration tools for peer assessment, developing the pupil’s literacy skills.

Collaborative online educational games are also shown, providing a safe environment on the web for pupils to improve their numeracy skills.

A rare chance to see me in the wild! I hope that you find some of what I articulate about the tools useful and please ensure you take a look at the context document that I wrote to accompany the film which is available in the “Resources” link.

It is lovely to see my old class talking about how they use technology and how it helps them. Some permission issues prevented me and the film itself from saying TutPup or Voicethread – it had to be all very generalised. But those three tools that I have mentioned and that appear in the film are stalwarts of my classroom practice – just today I sent out this Tweet

“My class is suddenly alive with the buzz of 30 Y5s playing+challenging each other on http://tutpup.com so much good game talk going on 🙂 “

The other films in the series are: