Last week at CMI2010, I had the opportunity to talk to presenters, as well as many participants about Twitter.

I had the feeling that the teachers, administrators, and superintendents, I spoke with, were genuinely interested in learning about Twitter.

Most of them had the notion that “it” was overwhelming and irrelevant to their lives though.  They had heard about Twitter and how it seemed to be the “best Professional Development” tool ever  invented and that more classrooms, schools and districts were starting to use Twitter as a form of communication.. .

…BUT they could not align that notion with their understanding of signing up for Twitter and being inundate with constant snippets of strangers’ whereabouts and responses of  “What is happening?”  in 140 characters or less.

Who has time for that?

It was a pleasure to introduce them to a new way of looking at Twitter, which puts them in complete control  over who they follow and how to grow a learning network  that is personalized to their interests and needs.

It was also important to point out that one did not have to dive in head first, but that it was possible and OK to test the waters and advance into the Twitter world little by little.

Here is another, very detailed  “Getting Started on Twitter”  guides:

• A Twitteraholic’s Guide to tweets, hashtags, and all things Twitter

I have also written a few Twitter related “How-To?” posts here on Langwitches.

• What is a Hashtag?
• Capital “RT” stands for Retweeting
• So, You Want to be Followed?

Summer break is here for most of the schools in the Northern Hemisphere. Carefree summer months of vacation time jealously come to mind of most non-educators when they think of the teaching profession.

Summer Break for Teachers

If you are a teacher, you KNOW though that summer break is not all fun in the sun, but it means Professional Development opportunities galore. Many conferences, workshops and seminars are being offered during the time, teachers are not contracted during the summer.

Professional Development

Going to and participating in these professional development opportunities is changing rapidly. Not only are many teachers attending virtually, but the way physical attendees are experiencing, sharing, digesting and documenting their learning is changing too.

21st Century Skills, 21st Century Fluencies and learning are not only happening in theory as the topic for professional development, but are being lived and applied in teacher learning and education at these conferences.

21st Century Skills, such as

• collaborating
• communicating
• connecting
• creating

are important to get the most out of your conference experience.

21st Century Fluencies, as described on the 21st Century Fluency Project‘s site are in demand.

The 21st Century Fluencies are not about technical prowess, they are critical thinking skills, and they are essential to living in this multimedia world. We call them fluencies for a reason. To be literate means to have knowledge or competence. To be fluent is something a little more, it is to demonstrate mastery and to do so unconsciously and smoothly.

These fluencies include:

• Digital Citizen Fluency
• Media Fluency
• Information Fluency
• Creativity Fluency
• Solution Fluency
• Collaboration Fluency

Attending a conference in 2o10 is putting the above mentioned skills to use and demonstrate that we, as educators, posses the fluencies of our century to create a different learning experience for ourselves and students altogether!

Before you physically arrive at the conference center, your experience already begins.

The conference organizers will have established a website with information about the conference, presenters and workshops. It is a good idea to familiarize yourself and explore the virtual setup:

• Explore links to presenters’ blogs, websites, twitter usernames and resources
• Take notice of scheduled video streamed events
• Bookmark and participate in presentation forums set up for pre- and post- conference discussion
• Take a look if the presenter has created a wiki with presentation materials
• Find out the official Hashtag used for the conference

Going to the conference

In the past , conference attendees used to bring a notepad, a pen and possibly a highlighter to presentations. Paper handouts were popular to take notes on and record the presenters contact information.

Image licensed under CC by dblstripe

The conference attendee in 2010, will most likely have one or even several electronic devices to write, record and connect with. Laptops, iPads or Smartphones make connecting with resources, a backchannel, virtual conference attendees, links, notes possible, easy and instant.

In 2010, conference attendees are taking online notes, recording the event via audio or video and sharing them digitally with colleagues, readers and listeners from around the world.

The old fashioned “notes” are now being recorded in form of a blog (journal type entries), on Twitter (microblogging in 140 characters or less), via digital images, audio or video. Instead of uni-dimensional, isolated notes, never to be looked at again, conference attendees are creating summaries, multi-media connected documentation of presentations and events, that collectively represent a variety of learning opportunities that do not end when the conference is over, nor is limited to the physical conference attendees.

Blogging:

When in a presentation, attendees can take notes directly into their blog to document what the presenter is sharing. They are able to link to resources and embed videos mentioned in the presentation. With a Smartphone, they can easily take images live at the presentation and insert into their blog post. Once the presentation is over, the post can be immediately published to invite others to leave their comments.

Blog posts can be:

• simple documentation by note taking
• extensions to the actual presentation by adding additional resources, such as links, embedded videso, audio and images
• your own reflections and reaction to the material, ideas and concepts presented

You can easily create your own blog for free by signing up with a blogging service, such as:

• WordPress
• Edublogs
• Blogger

Tweeting:

Twitter is micro-blogging, since you are limited to writing text to 140 characters or less. It is instant though. While a blog post might wait to be read, until your readers choose to visit your blog site or it appears in their RSS reader, a tweet is seen by your followers the second you post it (Similar to a text message). As you tweet and use the conference Hashtag, your tweets are added to all the other tweets using the same Hashtag, contributing like this your thoughts, ideas or summaries to a collective documentation of the event. Your tweets can fulfill the following functions:

• chronological documentation of what you are seeing and hearing
• precise summaries of concepts and ideas presented
• being the ears, eyes and voice for virtual attendees
• become part of a team that is covering the event and connect with other physical attendees face to face

Sue Waters wrote an exceptional blog post on how to get started with Twitter. Learn about:

Tips for signing up for your Twitter account

Before you start following other people make sure you

Tips for who to follow

Tips for engaging in the conversation

Getting more out of Twitter by Using a Twitter Client

Connecting using Hashtags

Don’t forget how we can use Twitter with our students

Flickr

Take images with your digital camera, then upload them to your Flickr account. If you are taking images with your SmartPhone, you can directly upload them to your Flickr account by e-mailing them to a specific e-mail address that Flickr provides ( Go under Your Account > E-mails & Notification).  Tag your photos with the conference hashtag. Don’t forget to embed images into your blog posts or tweets.

Audio- Podcast

Using an mp3 recorder, your SmartPhone or laptop’s built in microphone, you can record the entire or snippets of a presentation (with the presenter’s permission of course). Later on, these audio files can be edited in GarageBand (mac) or Audacity (PC) to then be uploaded and shared on your blog or conference website.

Ex. On the iPhone there are several apps available to record audio: Audio Memos and Audio Boo

Video Podcast

Flip Cameras or the built in video camera from your SmartPhone are great ways to record snippets from a presentation or interviews with presenters or other attendees about a specific topic. You can also use your laptop’s built in webcam to record diary type reflections about your presentation take-aways.

After the Conference

Once the conference or workshop has ended, the learning is not over yet. Presenters will have or are uploading digital handouts and presentation slides (Ex. Slideshare) Virtual and physical attendees take some time to digest what they have seen and heard before sharing their own reflective blog posts. Other educators around the world continue to add to the conversation that began at the physical conference by linking to presentation posts, tweets, audio or video from the conference.

Your Contribution and Your Learning in 2010?

If you are attending or have attended a conference or workshop this summer, what has been or will be your contribution? What will you add to the global conversation? How will you connect your learning to the learning of others? How will you demonstrate competencies in 21st Century Skills and Fluencies?

So, what is a Hashtag?

First thing you need to know that is has to do with Twitter, the microblogging service, which is quickly becoming mainstream (even the local tire store, now advertises their Twitter username).

How does a Hashtag look like? How do you recognize a hashtag?

A hashtag is easily recognizable within a tweet… just look for an “#”. The hashtag is the # plus the word or acronym behind it.

#edchat Hashtag

#AETC2010 - Conference Hashtag

Millions of people are on Twitter. They are tweeting “What’s Happening?”. As a user, you choose who you want to follow and how many you want to have in your network. You find people who have similar areas of interests or similar professions and read in your personalized time line which is populated with their tweets.

How to find specific topics though? How to create a “thread” that has specifically something to do with a particular topic or event?

Creating a Twitter Thread of a Particular Topic

How can you even pull in tweets about that topic from people you don’t normally follow? In comes a Hashtag!

I really liked the definition of “Hashtags”, I read on the Twitter Fan Wiki

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

The emphasis of a hastag ,for me, is that it is “Community Driven”, meaning that it will only work if members of a community are in accordance with and have agreed to use the same hashtag in order to contribute to a discussion and collaboratively “thread their tweets”.

As Converge Magazine wrote in the article “One Hashtag Helps Educators Change their Schools“,

Every day on Twitter, educators discuss issues they’re facing, share advice and pass on resources. But as Tom Whitby found out when he started debates on the social network, conversations can be hard to follow, especially when they’re mixed in with a bunch of tweets from other people.  That’s where the hashtag edchat comes in. Whitby worked with Shelly Terrell and Steven W. Anderson to provide a time, a place and a tag for educators to talk about major issues.

#Edchat, is a great example of how a hashtag can help you filter through Twitter chatter and zoom in onto one discussion thread. When searching for a hashtag, it is easy to pull together all the contributions, regardless if you follow the Twitter user or not. Check out all the  transcripts of different edchat topics on the EdChat wiki.

Trancript for "#edchat" Hashtag

In addition to threading a particular topic of discussion, hashtags are increasingly used as a way to bring conference or event attendees (physical and virtual ones) together. The hashtag serves a way to create a backchannel for the event or conference.

Cliff Atkinson, in his book, The Backchannel: How Audiences are Using Twitter and Social Media and Changing Presentations Forever, defines a backchannel as follows:

A backchannel is a line of communication created by people in an audience to connect with others inside or outside of the room

A hashtag for a conference or an event can extend past a particular presentation, workshop and even the physical conference days. The hashtag serves as a way to pull together all tweets related to the conference. A way to collaboratively document different sessions, link ideas and thoughts, thread emerging discussions happening at the physical conference as well as virtually around the globe. The hashtag particularly facilitates virtual attendees to search for conference related tweets and be able to participate by “having a voice” in the discussion as they include the hashtag in their tweets.

As mentioned above, a hashtag is community driven. Pulling together a threaded documentation or discussion will be ineffective or full of holes, if a conference community does not include the hashtag in the tweets or  different hashtags are circulating.

Hashtag for Curriculum Mapping Institute

It is a good idea for conference organizers to establish a particular conference hashtag ahead of the start of their event.

• Double check that it is not already in use and circulating by a different event
• Publicize the hashtag to your conference attendees and presenters
• Encourage and remind them to use the hashtag when tweeting about the conference
• Tweet about the conference, include the hashtag and invite virtual attendees to follow the hashtag to join in the conversation

Think of a hashtag this way…

Imagine the chatter about different topics going on Twitter like…

… a spilled bag of colorful beads…

…then imagine…

… the thread that will lace the beads, which go together to make a necklace, as the hashtag…

After the blog post from a few days ago “Tweeting with Elementary School Students“,  I wanted to follow up with a link to an amazing resource if you are considering using Twitter in the classroom: Classroom Tweets Wiki.

My teachers and students at my current school have heard me talk about Twitter more than once (well… more than a hundred times would be more accurate). I have been the “middle(wo)man” between the students and their classroom teachers to make connections (For Skype calls around the World), ask for advice, disseminate a project or request feedback (CSI Twitter) . How do I move from being that sole connector and disseminator to preparing students for that role?

I am planning on working this out with a 5th grade class (10-11 year olds).

First step was to create a Twitter Classroom account. At this point we are testing the waters and will protect our tweets, so only approved users can follow us.

We filled out the profile, added an avatar, link and a bio.

Lee Kolbert has set up a Google Spreadsheet for teachers who are using Twitter with their classroom ( students/parents). Great way to learn about how others are using it as a tool to communicate, collaborate and learn.

We had a “Twitter Meeting” with 5th grade to introduce Twitter and brainstorm ideas HOW the class was going to use it.

• Sharing with others when we skype with people from around the world and what we learned
• Summarize what happened in the classroom that day
• Share links to classroom blog posts
• Share with others how 5th graders learn best

As we were brainstorming, I sent out a Twitter shout out on my Langwitches account and asked:

5th graders and I are brainstorming HOW they will use a classroom twitter account. Give them some of your ideas . Please RT

Here are some of the great suggestions we received.

So, we are off to be pioneers in an uncharted territory of Twitterland with with elementary school students. I am hoping to observe and document our successes and pitfalls in order to encourage other educators to take the plunge and learn from our experiences.

If you are already experimenting with your elementary school students on/with Twitter, please share what you have learned.

We are also looking to follow other 5th grade classes to learn with and from.

“RT” stands for Re-Tweeting. That is when you take someone else’s tweet and send it off as your tweet plus the added acknowledging RT @username to the original sender.

It was not until recently that the web version of Twitter added a “Retweet” button.

Once you click the Retweet button, it copies the tweet and adds the original sender. I miss the opportunity to add anything additional to the RT though. That is a function that I enjoy while using TweetDeck.

A comment, from @studymentor left on a previous post “So, you want to be followed” made me think about the reasons why I retweet?

ReTweets must some value in one way or another, since there are even plugins that will add a button to each of you blog posts showing how often it has been retweeted and make it easy to directly retweet the link from within the post.

Here are some of my reasons for retweeting:

1. helping spread the word across many networks (spiderweb effect)
2. acknowledging a good tweet
3. documenting my own bread crumbs (creating a summary) of where I have been and learned.
4. to put an answer of mine into context, so others can follow back to the original question and also search for responses to it

Well, you will have guessed by now, I sent that same question on to my Twitter network. Here are some of the responses.

Please make YOUR case for RT on twitter by adding a comment in the section below, in an effort to help others understand the reasoning behind it.

I wrote about the power of “The Network” in Personal Learning Network Thoughts.  I would say that Twitter and my blog are the most important tools to the puzzle that make up my PLN.

It takes time and effort to build, grow, maintain and nurture my PLN. I get out of it what I put in it. The PEOPLE who make up my network are “IT”.

People Make Up the Puzzle of my Network

Twitter, especially, illustrates this concept for me. The people who constitute my Twitter network are like pieces of a puzzle. I carefully select them. They have to “fit” just right to help complete the whole picture I am trying to create. They are contributing to my “big” picture. Each puzzle piece has a different “view”, that individually might be random and too detailed to see where it might belong.

The reason for writing this post, is to make one part of creating and growing my PLN transparent. Maybe it will be insightful to some, helpful or useless to others as they are trying to grow their own network or become part of someone else’s. There are many different strategies regarding the Twitter following/not following issue (Always remember the “personal” part in PLN)  For a different approach, check out Alan Levine’s “My (backwards) Twitter Follow Strategy“.

Under my Twitter settings, I checked off  the “E-mail when someone starts following me” box.

Twitter Settings

I do check every  new Twitter follower notification I receive!

On one hand, I want to weed out any “weird” followers, like p*rn stars/sites or the one who only followed women with the same first name as mine and on the other hand, I want to take the opportunity to check my new follower out to determine if they could be a new addition to my learning network.

My Personal Learning Network, well, is personal. I get to determine who I want to be part of it and who will only add “chatter” that does not interest me. My Twitter network is made up of people who are the puzzle pieces that contribute to my area of passions, interests in teaching & learning in a multilingual, multicultural, technology rich, practical, theoretical, world of connected educators. I especially look to have puzzle pieces that are diverse (languages, countries of residence, subject areas, positions, primary/secondary/terciary) yet pretty homogeneous (educators, third culture kids, globally oriented)

One of three things will happen after I check their Twitter page out:

1. I will follow them back
2. I will not follow them back
3. I will block them to follow my updates

Here are some of the criteria I use to determine if which of the above action I will follow. I will use examples from some of the new follower- notifications I received in the last few days.

Looking at Profile Information, Tweets and Followers

Here are some of the first things, I check as soon as I am on a new follower’s Twitter page:

1. Name, profile and bio description
2. How many people are already following him?
3. The last ~10 tweets they posted

This new follower gives me NO information who they are and  how they would contribute to my learning. Since there is no link to a blog or other site for further information, nor do I know if he/she is part of the educational world, marketing group or dating service , I go ahead and block him from my updates.

Profile, Tweets, Name

The above new follower also neglected to add his name and a profile description. It just happened to make a connection with his username and remembered that he had taken the time to comment on a blog post of mine the day earlier, where he did leave the URL to his teaching blog. Because I liked what I saw there, I  started following Keith on Twitter, although he neglected to add much information about him that would have enticed me otherwise to add him.

Other people they follow

Again, another new follower who did not add any bio description or a link to a blog or site for further information. I am looking at the people he/she is following and am recognizing various edu-tweeters who are already in my network too. I am also glancing over to the last few tweets and am seeing that he/she mentions that “Twitter is blocked at school”. So, it is a pretty safe guess that he/she is somehow education – related. Yet, not enough information… I don’t add his/her to my network, but do not block either.

Link to Blog or Website

There is no bio description of this new Twitter follower,but there is a link to a website. The domain already gives it away…. something with marketing… I also see that they are following ISTE and K12Online Conference, so he must have some interest in education, but am not following back.

Bio Description

This new follower did a nice job with their name, location, site link and bio definition. I learn that they live in Portugal, he is a German and English teacher and interested in ICT. He writes in English and Portuguese. Great! That decision was easy and I am following him back.

Last 10 Tweets

Again, am very happy with the profile information left by this new follower. Am also checking out the last few tweets and like what I see: there are RT (re-tweets), directly addressing someone else (@username) and also other contributions that are interesting to me. She is from Brazil, which contributes to my global network, so I start following her as well.

So, now you have seen a little insight into my thoughts who I add or block in my PLN.

If you are trying to grow your Twitter follower base, you might want to keep these criteria in mind if you want to be followed back.

1. Fill out your profile information
   1. Name
   2. Location
   3. Link to your blog, website or linked in page
   4. Bio description with your areas of interests
2. Have some interesting tweets posted yourself BEFORE your start following hundreds of people.
   1. RT interesting tweets from others.
   2. Directly address someone’s tweet by replying with @username
   3. Share what you are learning or working on
3. Make sure that you don’t have “p*rn” stars or sites that appear in YOUR “following” list.
4. Leave comments on blogs and sign with your Twitter username

What are some of your criteria to decide if you are following back or blocking a new follower? Can you contribute tips and advice to Twitter newbies who want to grow their follower list? Please share.

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