Tag-Archive for ◊ twitter ◊

Twitter Literacy (Twitteracy?)
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012 | Author:

Today I tried another Twitter lesson (here was another attempt). As PPA teacher I often don’t find out what I’m doing until the day before and this was no exception. As part of the literacy in Year 3-4 they were looking at writing newspaper reports based on traditional tales and nursery rhymes. For today’s lesson we were due to hotseat as a character and write questions for them. I thought that the children would enjoy this, but I also knew that people on Twitter would too. Normally when I tweet a response for a Twitter lesson I get maybe 10-20 replies, but this one went, well, just a little bit crazy.

The basic question was: “If you could ask a question for a traditional tale character, what would you ask?”

I asked people to include #class6interview in their reply and they came thick and fast. I spent around an hour laughing (out loud – lol) at some of them that were incredibly funny.

Now, the plan was to use visible tweets to show the tweets on the board as the lesson was going on so that the children had ideas to draw from. I have done this a number of times and had never had any problems. I don’t usually check the tweets completely beforehand but this time I’m glad that I did. One tweet mentioned the old lady in the shoe and her lack of contraception, others were also not appropriate. Now some people might not have realised that this was aimed at 7-9 year olds and were just joining in the fun but it meant that I was limited to what I could share with the class. Unfortunately I didn’t notice this until around 8:30 this morning. I planned to copy and paste some of the tweets to share with the children instead but Kevin McLaughlin (@kvnmcl) Storify-ed them for me here so that I had some to use. @e_gran also offered to collate the best ones too, so thank you too.

I tweeted that I was upset that my plan was ‘ruined’ and many people offered suggestions for tools that I could use and agreed with my anger that people had spoilt it. Others apologised if they were to blame (@bellaale it wasn’t you! – political satire might not be appropriate for 7 yr olds but they wouldn’t have noticed)

So…the lesson. I started by explaining the task and then showed some of the tweets. We spent about 10 minutes going through the tweets and laughing at them. I also spent a bit of time hotseating as the wolf and explaining why I had tried to eat Red Riding Hood. The children were inspired and went away buzzing with ideas. Throughout the lesson they wrote questions for the characters and if I spotted a great one, we tweeted it. 10minutes from the end we came back and they had a go at interviewing each other and sharing answers. As a final exercise I chose a child to be a character and we spent some time asking her questions too. All-in-all it was a fantastic lesson and the children had a lot of fun asking and answering questions.

The best ones can be found through our @stjohnswaltham account. For the full list of Tweets from everyone, try looking here.

So, will I use Twitter again even though some of the tweets weren’t appropriate? Of course I will. I just need to be careful and have a quick look through before displaying them.

Have you used Twitter in your class? How did it go? Could you use it in a future lesson? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

Category: General Thoughts  | Tags: ,  | Leave a Comment
A lesson on Twitter
Thursday, September 08th, 2011 | Author:

One thing that sometimes happens as PPA teacher is that I have to teach the same lesson twice to two different classes. This isn’t a bad thing as it means I can try different things and achieve different outcomes because the children are different. For today’s lesson I thought I’d use Twitter to make it a bit more exciting…but it turned out to make it random and a lot of fun too!

The lesson was part of the ancient Greek topic and being the first lesson, we needed to look at Modern-day Greece. What is it like? Where is it? What key information can we find out about it?

After the initial ‘Who has been to Greece?’ conversations, we found it on a Google map and began exploring. Now, the usual stuff can all be found on Wikipedia e.g. currency, time zone, capital, flag and so on but I wanted to challenge the children further. So I asked the lovely/bonkers people on Twitter.

My question was simple. What would you like my class to find out about Greece? I asked people to include the #greecequest hashtag meaning that I could show www.visibletweets.com on the whiteboard and they could see answers that came in. We didn’t get hundreds, but we did get some great ones!

(Potentially this could pose a risk as I don’t check the tweets before they appear on te whiteboard, but I am happy to manage this risk)

Questions included:

  • Who is number 1 in the Greek charts?
  • Why is the flag blue and white?
  • Where has all the money gone?
  • Can you buy a Subway sandwich?
  • How far is it from Marathon to Athens?
  • Have they ever done well in Eurovision?
  • Who won the Greek football league last year?

So, as you can see it was a bit random. It led to some amazing questions from the children. When looking at which football team won last year, we noticed the Greek league didn’t play from 1940-1945 so we discussed why. We also wondered where the Greek people were going as there were a million less of them in 2011 compared to 2009. We found out that the stripes on their flag are there to represent each syllable in the Greek motto! We also found out that their current debt works out at around 300,000 euros for every man, woman and child! Where possible we sent the answers back to the people who had asked them too.

The children were enthused and eager to find out the answers for the people of Twitter. As the questions popped up, they asked who the people were. I could only reply “he’s a deputy headteacher, he works for 2simple, not sure about that one”, but they didn’t mind. It gave them excitement and a purpose to their research.

One drawback was that the lesson ended at 10am and we had to move on to other things but tweets kept coming in! So I used these in the afternoon with the other class.

It seemed to work very well and I look forward to seeing the factfile that the children build up about Greece. I also want to say a massive thank-you to everyone who helped!

 

Category: ICT Planning  | Tags: ,  | 2 Comments
Northern Grid Conference #ngconf
Friday, June 24th, 2011 | Author:

Today I am in Newcastle presenting at the Northern Grid Conference. I am still shocked and in disbelief that I have been invited to attend let alone share a workshop with award-winning teacher Jan Webb. Anyways, it was tough knowing what to share so I decided to share 15 ideas in 15 minutes. Now I know that is a lot but I wanted to give a brief overview of some tools that people could use for free. Then they could look at this blog post here and review the presentation and look at the 3x3links of the tools, how-to videos, blog posts and examples. Hopefully everyone will find at least one tool that they can use with their children.

Enjoy!

 

Category: Conferences / BETT  | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,  | 4 Comments
The ‘whatever’ daily is out now zzzz
Tuesday, March 29th, 2011 | Author:

One thing I hate about Twitter is a service where people’s tweets are collated together and put on to a daily newspaper called the ‘tech daily’ or whatever. Sometimes I get alerted to these as my tweets or blog posts appear in them. Does anyone read them?

I certainly don’t and see it almost as spam and I don’t think I’m alone. Someone tweeted once ‘Whenever a daily edition is published, a fairy dies, stop it now’ and that is my reaction too. Until now.

I still hate the daily newspapers but I have found a use for them. I have set up www.paper.li to publish a weekly roundup of blogs from my school.

So how did I do it? First, you need a Twitter account. You also need a blog (or 15ish in our case), all of the blog posts feed automatically through the Twitter account using Twitterfeed. Then I went to www.paper.li and asked it to create a weekly newspaper collating all of the blogposts/tweets from our school account, @stjohnswaltham.

This now sends me a newspaper each Sunday and the first thing I do? Send it to all of our children in Key Stage 2.

Do you want to have a look? Visit: http://paper.li/StJohnsWaltham

I’d love it if you could subscribe or click on a post and leave some comments. I’m not sure how you categorise the posts e.g. technology or leisure, but it looks great and the children will now get blog posts each week direct to their inbox.

Category: General Thoughts  | Tags: ,  | One Comment
Write once – post many
Sunday, September 05th, 2010 | Author:

Ok, so you’ve got a Twitter account. You’ve got Facebook. Your class have a blog. Your school has a website. Oh and don’t forget the VLE as well. That’s potentially a lot of places to be writing information. But let’s not forget the traditional format of the paper newsletter to parents and the other ways such as texting parents. Which website or format do you point them to? All of them? I know I’d get confused with that! What you need to think about is a way of writing once and getting that to feed to other sources to reduce your workload and make it all a bit more familiar for visitors.

(Just read this paragraph back and it sounds like a bad American TV ad. I think it’s because we had American TV on holiday and I watched too much of it on a rainy day. Are you fed up with small cupcakes? Do your muffins never come out correctly? You need Bigtop Cupcake!) Anyway, I digress…

There are so many different ways of getting these formats and sites to crossover and talk to each other, but I’ll just talk about some of them and the ways I will be doing it at my new school.

We will be blogging with our school and with this there are two main choices. Well, there’s the choice of which system to use (mainly Posterous, Blogger or WordPress) but then the choice is between quick, easy and free (wordpress.com) or a self-hosted blog which costs about £10 a year for hosting but gives you more control. I went for the latter. We have set-up a site that will contain each class blog. The teachers will have logins and then they can blog and it will appear here. But I want it to go further. I could use a plugin on the blogs to tweet automatically, but purely for the reason I;ve been using it a while, I’ve gone for Twitterfeed. It’s quick, easy and free.

To use Twitterfeed, you will need a Google account (it accepts others too, but you’ve probably already got a Google one) Once logged in you simply click new feed, give it a name and paste in the RSS feed. What’s an RSS feed? Well it’s the system that sends out updates from sites such as blogs, news sites or sport sites. The kind of site that updates regularly anyway. You then use an RSS reader such as Google Reader, Feedly, or your VLE to read them and turn this into text/links. If you can’t find your blog’s RSS feed, in the address bar at the top of your blog, there will be an RSS icon like this one (unless you’re using an old browser like Internet Explorer 6. Shame on you if you are) or the star will be yellow in Firefox.

Click that and you should be asked to subscribe, you’ll also see a link for the RSS. The RSS for this blog is http://ianaddison.net/?feed=rss2 Unhelpfully, not all RSS feeds follow the same format. I showed teachers how to use RSS feeds when training on the VLE and every one seems different, some end .xml, some have rss in the address and so on. Trial and error sometimes comes into play. Luckily, Twitterfeed has a check facility so you can see if you’ve found the right bit!

Under the advanced Twitterfeed settings I changed my time to every 30minutes and for it to just post the title rather than title and description. I only did this because it made the tweet a bit shorter and a bit easier to retweet should anyone want to. You can also choose a prefix and suffix. I went with a prefix of ‘New blog post:’ Not very exciting, but sometimes you need simple and obvious!

On page two, you can then choose a twitter account to tweet with e.g. my school blogs will tweet through the school account and my personal blog will go through my own twitter account. You can set it up to post as your status on Facebook too. I did for about 4 blog posts but then turned it off as most of my friends thought I was a geek/loser (delete as applicable) So that’s blogs and Twitter linked…

Our VLE, Studywiz has a built-in RSS reader too so when we have our VLE set-up properly, the blog posts will also feed into this.

Our website is setup using a system called Joomla. This is a content management system which means that you don’t need to know much about websites and the code behind them to get it to work. I can also include little plugins to show things like maps, video or in this case, tweets. On the left-hand side, it will show the 6 latest tweets from my school Twitter account – @stjohnswaltham – The tweets will mainly be about our latest blog posts, but I will be investigating setting up our Google Calendar to tweet key events too. At the bottom of our twitter plugin is a link to follow us too.

As one last thing I have also put the links to our blogs on our school website on their own tab so people can find them that way.

So what will I be telling visitors and parents? Go to our website. From there you can see our website (obviously) our tweets and our blogs. We might also share our Twitter name but I’m not currently planning to share the blog addresses with everyone, I’d rather they found them through our website.

It does take a bit of time (maybe 2mins per twitterfeed) to set this all up, but once it’s done you’re away. Please do have a look at what we’ve started to do on our school site: http://stjohnthebaptistprimary.co.uk/ but bear in mind term hasn;t started yet so the blogs are empty!

Category: Useful Sites/Software  | Tags: , ,  | 4 Comments
PGCE Guide (useful for anyone!)
Thursday, August 12th, 2010 | Author:

I love Twitter. You may have gathered that if you are a regular reader! One of the huge powers of using Twitter is to crowd source. This involves someone chucking out an idea, letting others add to it, watching it develop into a monster and then bringing it all together into something useful.

One way this has been done is by creating books. This has been done before with #movemeon, where teachers were asked to send ideas (in 140 characters or less) for how to move on their classroom practice. This is a fantastic read and it covers a wide-range of different suggestions. This can be found here.

The latest book is called pgcetips. This is the brainchild of a guy called @tomhenzley who has just finished his PGCE and is about to embark into the world of teaching. He asked for people to share their thoughts and tips to help other trainee students get started. This is a great idea and the book is available here: http://bit.ly/pgceguide. On that page is a link to download it or buy it as a paper copy.

Best thing about downloading these books?

They’re free.

Doesn’t cost anything.

CPD that is easy to read and free? Why aren’t you checking them out already?

Category: General Thoughts  | Tags: , ,  | Leave a Comment
An idea that grew and grew
Saturday, July 24th, 2010 | Author:

I blogged a couple of weeks back about my new vision for our VLE. This has been implemented across 400+ primary schools here in Hampshire and I have been working away on the shared area recently trying to populate it with content and useful resources. One thing that has worked really well is the use of Delicious.

Now as you may know, Delicious is a great way of storing websites for use anywhere, it certainly beats the old way of just storing them on your browser on your home PC. I started a county-wide account a few months back, and this has gone down very well with people I’ve shown it to. The next step is to share it with a wider audience. That’s where the RSS feed comes in.

I started by using the RSS reader in Studywiz to ‘collect’ all websites that were tagged with a certain word and put this RSS feed into that area in the shared group. For example, http://delicious.com/hampshirebookmarks/football has all of our websites that are tagged with ‘football’. This page has an RSS feed and our VLE can take this and display a list of the sites. Nice :-)

One problem is that I don’t have many websites on the county Delicious account yet, I need more. I know that Parkfield have LOADS of websites, so I start doing the same for those. Very nice indeed :-)

I was content to leave it at that until I saw a tweet from @primarypete_ where he mentioned networks.

He said: (I’m) changing way I use Delicious. Out with google reader of new links. In with big network of educator users to search: http://bit.ly/b0aTbe

This got me thinking. Could I build a network of teachers too? Obviously I’d borrow some that Pete had, so I did. Within a few minutes I had a few responses to my tweet asking for help and then via Delicious I found more. I now have a network of 10 within about 2 minutes. That’s 10 schools/people that are sharing websites with me. So now back to the VLE, I’m now collecting the RSS feeds of my network’s websites instead of individual schools. This should make it much easier for teachers to find useful websites!

Couple of downsides though. When you are searching through your network’s tags, it doesn’t show them as a drop-down menu. So I need to check food_chains, food-chains and foodchains to make sure I have them all.

Also, I’ve found that lots of people neglect the comment/description box. So I have a list of websites but you have to visit some to understand what they are.

So what started as a way of sharing websites, has now grown into a massive library of websites found by teachers and shared with others. Fantastic!

Our network can be found here: http://delicious.com/network/hampshirebookmarks

So, does your VLE have an RSS reader? Could you share your links with staff that way?

Category: Learning Platforms  | Tags: ,  | 2 Comments
Holidays are coming…
Friday, July 23rd, 2010 | Author:

So, the holidays are here, time for us teachers to sit around on our backsides for 6 weeks. Fantastic. Or maybe not, do you know any teachers that relax for the whole 6 weeks? Me neither!

This holiday will be a strange one and busy one. I’m moving back into school, into a role that is still being defined and it’s also the first summer holiday as a home owner so there’s bound to be house-y things to do as well. Add in seeing friends, going on holiday and the small matter of GTAUK next week and it will fill up quite quickly! But what else will I be up to?

*School Website. This is one of my first priorities. My new school has a website, it’s ok, but it seems quite complicated to add things to it and usually this is just in the form of newsletters. I will be moving to a much simpler system which means that we can get a few people, and some children, adding content to the site.I also want to make it sustainable so will be making videos of how to use the website so staff can keep it up.

*Setting up blogs for every class. I think this will be done using WordPress MU. I’m tempted to setup a new domain and then create class blogs from there so everyone follows the same naming convention. Going to a school with a name as popular as St Johns means a lot of domain names are already taken! I’m not sure yet how I will start using the blogs and how I will convince staff they are useful, but we shall see. I am working in 7 out of 11 classes so I think I’ll start it when I’m in their class. Once it is popular with children, I’ll bring staff onboard.

*Policies and stuff. As mentioned before I will be writing policies and AUPs and action plans this holiday too. I know I should probably wait until September, but I want to get the majority of it ready while I have time.

*VLE. We will be launching our VLE slowly next term, again with the classes I teach and then gradually throughout the school, hoping to have it in place by Spring. I want to make sure I get this right after spending two years telling teachers how to do it! Every school is different though so I need to think about my staff and make sure that I do things in a way that makes sense.

*Reading Blogs. I am awful at reading other people’s blogs. I read posts when they appear on Twitter if the title catches my eye, but generally, I’m awful at it. I have setup Google Reader, but never really used it properly. I have 500+ posts to read and it’s just silly. So one job this Summer is to find a way of keeping up with it and managaing the information that comes through. It might be Google Reader, in which case, I’ll make sure I;m better at reading them each week!

*Twitter Favourites/Delicious. I use Twitter a lot (you may have noticed). Often I use it on my phone and some links don’t work properly or I haven’t got time to read something so I favourite the tweet instead or send the link to my Delicious account. This means I have 100′s of tweets that I need to work through and I probably should tidy up my delicious account a bit too. I want to start September productively and continue it on too.

*Hampshire Delicious. We set up a county-wide Delicious a little while ago and I have added some links to it, but it stands at around 240. I want to make this much bigger and maybe look at linking with people who already have decent accounts set up to see if I can improve ours. I also need to begin publicising it to schools.

*VLE Shared area. I talked about this just 2/3 weeks ago, but now I have shown it to around 70 teachers. They love it. I have been overwhelmed with the response to it so far and I am very pleased. Currently we have around 30 areas/topics that people have been busy adding content to. I have setup RSS feeds from Delicious and I have also been linking activities from Brain Pop and Purple Mash. I need to finish this off and then start adding from other sites such as iboard and BBC Class Clips. Two other things I want to do are adding games and CPD. The games folder will be a collection of online games that students (and teachers) can play that encourage thinking activities. I will share some of these later, but Physics Games is a good place to start. I also want to put a staff development area as well which will contain RSS feeds/embedded pages of blogs from a wide-range of subjects relevant to the primary phase as well as videos from TED Talks and others that might be useful. Our VLE would be a great place for CPD and I want to push this side of it a bit more.

*Articles for Naace. I was discussing Naace with a few people, including the always excellent Miles Berry, and I was suggesting that there seemed to be a distinct lack of content and voice from the primry teachers. There are lots of secondary and consultants that are willing to share and be heard, but where are the primaries. Following some interesting discussions with Miles and others, I am now writing two articles for Naace. I’m sure there’s a lesson to be learnt in there somewhere??

*Clearing out my old email. As I leave the consultancy role, I need to make sure I have saved everything useful, cleared it all out and moved properly to my new email instead.

*Top Secret Project. This is really exciting, but I can’t share anything until next week. Sorry!!

It sounds like a lot, but some of those jobs will take half a day, so it isn’t that bad really. I think sharing my to-do list will be useful because I can reflect on this when I return in September and see how much of this I achieved and how many other things got added to the list throughout the holidays!

Enjoy your break everyone, you’ve worked hard and you deserve it.

Category: General Thoughts, ICT Co-ordinator Stuff  | Tags: , , , ,  | 4 Comments
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