Adventures in Teaching and Learning

I feel that since I have been blogging so little recently, and using Twitter so much, I should share some of the interesting links that I have discovered, and some of the interesting twitterers that I follow. (If I mention you, and you wish me to remove you, please let me know via the comment box – or DM me on Twitter!)

Twitterholic – According to their website, Twitterholic “robots scan the Twitter public timeline for new twits to tweet. A few times a day, we calculate individual statistics for each twittering twit in our database.” You can look up your own stats to see what your ranking is; however, it is also useful to see who the most popular Twitterers are (Barack Obama followed by Stephen Fry, as of Friday 13 February 2009). Jonathan Ross joined only 75 days ago, and he is already at number 12.

Mr Tweet is my next recommendation. When you follow him, he will suggest people that you might like to follow, including people who are particularly relevant to you, based on what you twitter about. I found loads of interesting technological educators … which brings me to my next site.

TwitterSheep is like Wordle for Twitter. If you enter your username, TwitterSheep will look at the bios of your followers and come up with a word cloud. You can see mine (well, my most recent one) on TwitPic here. Alternatively you can search among your own tweets to see what you tweet about. Mine was too big to take a screenshot …

TwitPic could do with some more explaining. Well, not much explaining. You can upload photos or send them from your mobile, and these will be added as a link to your twitter feed.

I’ve just uploaded TweetDeck to my computer. So it’s maybe not the best time to give any sort of opinion! But it gets good write ups elsewhere, and Phillip Schofield uses it. Along with loads of other people. You can see everyone’s tweets, but you can also make groups; I can therefore follow my personal friends, helpful educational twitterers, people who tweet about Malawi and celebrities, as well as getting my BBC updates etc.

Twitter_Tips is an interesting general twitterer to follow: this application (?) posts links to interesting general Twitter news.

I’ve mentioned Terry Freedman a number of times now on my blog. I often get links to interesting articles via him. I recently came across Alvin Trusty (via his excellent blog post on how to create a great powerpoint). Another twitterer worth following is Tom Barrett, particularly for links to such excellent presentations such us Nineteen (and counting) Interesting Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom.

Hmmm. There are so many more. I am following just over 100 people, many of them top class “edtech” folk, who obviously live interesting lives and also provide me with links to fascinating posts and news about new technology in education. I had hoped to add some links to a few of the interesting recent news and posts about Twitter that I have read in the last couple of days, but it is Saturday the Fourteenth now, rather than Friday the Thirteenth, and I have to get some sleep! I hope there has been something of interest to you in this post. Which will be twittered on my Twitter feed at some point in the near future …

ADDED LATER:
50 ideas on using Twitter in education – thanks to Carol Cooper-Taylor, whose blog I found via Twitter_Tips.

A directory of Learning Professionals (and others) on Twitter – digital breadcrumbs meant I went from Carol’s blog to Jane Hart’s blog, to her Twitter page, to her other blog, to here! I also found Twitlet through her. Many thanks, Jane!

Some of you may wish to join and add to the Twitter for Teachers wiki.

I’ve just found Clif’s Notes … on Twitter in Education. There are plenty of links there that you could follow to find out more. Clif’s Notes linked to Tom Barrett’s post on using Twitter in the classroom, in a Maths lesson on probability. Nice one!

Terry Freedman often has very interesting articles on his blog, and as an active Twitter user, these are well advertised to other Twits with too much time on their hands. Like me. At the moment. (Snow Day 2!) Anyway, the topic of Social Networking: the Pros and Cons with emphasis on safety is one that has been covered in a variety of other places, so if that was all it was, I probably wouldn’t have mentioned the article here, even though it is quite interesting in itself. But what caught my eye was Terry’s admission that he belongs to 63 social networks! Which made me wonder … how many do I belong to?

So here goes. I may include some links, although others are more private, some I am dormant in, and others I may have been thrown out of by now for never having used them! I am sure there will be some I have forgotten.

Facebook
Twitter
Ning
Dipity
Friends Reunited
LinkedUp
Plurk
Classroom 2.0
Haringey Transformation Teachers’ Programme
Diigo
Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0
Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers
Slideshare
Flickr

So that’s 14 so far. Sorry, post took much longer than planned: I ended up browsing around Friends Reunited! So that’s one of the main problems of Social Networking! I was supposed to be marking!

View my page on Classroom 2.0

Hopefully the badge does the trick! I’m not sure what to do with Classroom 2.0 now though … so many social networking sites to keep an eye on!

Was pleasantly surprised to be greeted by an intro to the internet when I logged on to the BBC homepage this morning. Will need to go and investigate further now!

I am in two minds about posting this link here, but as a Teachers’ TV Associate, I have a responsibility to encourage other teachers to use the excellent resources that can be found on the Teachers’ TV website, and I was quite pleased with my students when they were recorded … so here goes. Follow the link to find out more about Online Social Networks.