Students & Twitter - Part I

Tweet

A few days ago, I introduced the explosively-popular micro-blogging tool Twitter to my Web 2.o class. Upon creating accounts, downloading TweetDeck, and toying with our settings, we began down the micro-blogging path exploring Twitter's usefulness.

I relayed the importance of developing a quality community of followers and the equally important task of who the students should follow. I recommended politicians, some celebrities, sports starts, companies, and the like. Students then went on to find their own, some more useful than others (I suppose that's the point for them, though, to customize Twitter for their own liking). I was surprised when students found other teachers on campus (only because I could not imagine these "old-timers" using Twitter!) and was amazed at their ability to be completely engaged with the task-at-hand.

Today's Twitter experiment involved students tweeting education-related articles from the Internet. Their instructions were to find a relevant article pertaining to education, utilize TweetDeck to shorten the URL, and to tweet the article with a short description, all while including our class hashtag.

Here are some of the more interesting articles:

2 Year Study to Learn What Makes Teachers Good
CollegeQuad - College Tweets
U.N. Position Paper on Technology
Why is Education so Important?
Listening to Music Helps Students be More Productive

Next class we'll be attempting Twitter Polls via twtpoll.com, stay tuned!

Follow Mr. Dooley on Twitter, @MrDooley.

Twitter & TweetDeck

Tweet

I have recently started tweeting again and have connected with numerous teachers and administrators across the U.S. I honestly never saw a point to twitter until recently. You see, I am currently taking courses in the Educational Leadership M.Ed. program at UNLV. I often have assignments that involve interviewing administrators and twitter has allowed me to "tweet" with the brightest minds across the nation. To me, this is a huge advantage as all I have to do is perform a simple twitter search and find numerous results. Most people on twitter have been happy to help me out and have provide excellent insight as to how schools are run outside of Las Vegas valley.

Not completely enjoying the "web-based" environment of twitter, I found TweetDeck.com. Upon downloading and logging in to my twitter account, I was greated with this UI:


If you're looking to simplify your twitter experience, I strongly suggest looking into TweetDeck. You will notice that it puts your Friends' tweets, your Replies, and your Direct Messages into three easy to follow columns. You even have the ability to TwitPics, shorten URLs, and perform twitter searches all inside of TweetDeck. I will never have to log in to the website again...

Oh, and in case you are wondering, I can be found on twitter as MrDooley and usually tweet with hashtags such as #edutech, #education, #teacher, and #teaching.