Archive for February, 2008
Where do blogs rate?
When I first started fleshing out my network, it was all about blogs. I blogged, I read blogs daily, I commented my heart out and spent many a night typing late into the evening trying to get ideas down juuuussstt right.
Soon after that it was podcasting. I listened to podcast every day during my 45 minute commute, I recorded a podcast at least every week or so, and was obsessed with exploring ways to incorporate podcasting into the school environment.
Now I find myself presenting for teachers face to face more than ever and doing presentations many of which are focusing on new technologies. I can’t tell you how many times I’m restructuring or tweaking a presentation to incorporate new sites or examples just minutes before clipping on the microphone. And given travel schedules, baby schedules, work schedules, and so on, I find that I’m spending more time on sites like Twitter, and less in other locations.
I don’t read blogs like I used to. I don’t pop open the aggregator nearly as often and read through what’s there. Devoting an hour to reading new blogs seems like a luxury that just doesn’t come around very often. However, I do read a ton of blog entries still. Instead, I read the ones people recommend on Twitter. Or that people email to me and say are “Must-Reads”. Or as I”m searching for tidbits to put into presentations, tools to incorporate in my work, or scrolling through the DEN and various Ning message boards, I read the blogs that are linked to there. And of course, so long as I read one post on a blog, I often scroll through and read several.
So while I do read a ton of blog posts, I just find that the aggregator is getting less and less use.
I’m curious to hear whether other people are experiencing the same sort of shift. Do you still use the aggregator like you first did when you entered into the world of blogging? Or have you shifted to other locations/tools/sites to get your EdTech info kick?
The reason I ask is that I still show people how to set up Bloglines and Google Reader in presentations, and I”m wondering if I’m living in the past. Should I be showing them how to set up My Yahoo, iGoogle and Netvibes instead? Is that more relevant at this point?
Whatcha think?
Building a better Twitter
I discovered Tweet Scan yesterday, which at first glance looks like yet another Twitter search engine. To be honest, I’ve been pretty disappointed with most Twitter searches, namely because they don’t go back far enough, take too long or just give wonky results. Consequently, I had pretty low expectations for Tweet Scan. I was pleasantly surprised.
The basic search already deviates from expectations right from the get go. Instead of just being able to do a basic search, it allows you to filter that search to a specific username. So, you can scan just your tweets, or the tweets from a friend. I’m still waiting for someone to add in a third option, ‘scan the people I follow’, a search that will filter the results based on tweets by the people that you’ve chosen to follow, which for the most part are the only tweets you see! The search seems to be accurate, very readable, and has links to scan back farther. I did a search for FETC and was able to pull out results as far back as mid December. Not bad, not bad… The results also come with a “Tweet this” link, a permalink to that search and an RSS feed as well.
The site could use some UI help, but if you go into settings you’ll see five customizable fields. By putting in keywords there you can set it up to do some automated searches for you. For example, you could have it automatically pull out references to your name. For example, sometimes people might type “@stevedembo” instead of “@teach42″. Problem being, the former won’t pull up under replies. You could also search for things like, “digital storytelling” to see a report of every tweet with that keyword. And so on. You can set it to email you the results daily, weekly, or even drag the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar. Every time you click it, it rotates through your saved searches. Slick!
This really starts to add some pretty neat functionality to Twitter. I do Twitterpolls all the time, but if I ask people to respond with a specfic keyword (for example, TP42a), I can get an RSS feed of just those results. Perhaps I could even use a widget to display JUST those results into something…. like a blog post for example.
So if I posted a Twitterpoll asking, “What’s your favorite Twitter hack or application?”, I could dynamically display the results below. Now wouldn’t that be nifty, eh? Tweet Scan seems to be lagging about 12-24 hours behind real-time, but results should start to pop in below.
UPDATE:
Well, they should. But they didn’t. In fact, there’s a two day blackout period that Tweetscan isn’t finding any results in. Very disappointing. YOu can see the results on a TerraMinds search, but the RSS feed seems wonky and I couldn’t get it to populate below. Very bummed about that. But it’s not worth investing any more time into right now. Feh.
Passion Quilt
I don’t normally do too many meme’s. Most of them I feel perfectly happy passing on. But when Lee Kolbert tagged me with this one (called me out is more like it), I felt obligated to participate, in part due to the challenge of it. The 3 simple rules are:
- Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
- Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
- Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.
Yeah, like it’s an easy task trying to find an image that represents your passion. Something hi-tech, right? Web 2.0-ish? Something with the classroom of the future, right? Or maybe a group of teachers collaborating on some massive challenge?
In the end, I went with this.
Take away our computers, take away our whiteboards, take away our mobile devices, and unplug the power. Take away the books, take away our manipulatives, take away our art materials and take away the desks. What’s left?
Teachers and students. And I dare say every teacher I know would still feel perfectly comfortable stepping up in front of the students and getting right back to the business of learning. Regardless of where, when and who, we teach because we are passionate about preparing future generations to be as successful as they possibly can. And we’ll do it with or with technology.
SO, there’s my image. What’s yours?
I do hereby tag: Joyce Valenza, John Pederson, Doug Johnson, David Jakes and…
Well, for my last ‘tag’ I tag all STAR Discovery Educators who are just getting started on the DEN blogs. If you’ve never posted before, you have a reason to do so now! If you’d like to see what STARs are writing about, visit our STAR Directory. Most recently updated blogs are at the top.
Citizen Marketers, free copy for secondary and higher ed teachers
One of the non-educational blogs that I’m incredibly fond of us the Church of the Customer blog. The co-authors used to live in Chicago and I’ve had the pleasure of having lunch with them a few times. Every time we ever did, I walked away with new ideas and perspectives about communities and how to foster them.
They’ve written two books, and a few days ago they announced that any high school or college teacher that might want to consider using the book for their classes can request a review copy. It’s not for everyone, but if you teach any sort of class relating to business or marketing, it’s definitely worth reading (as is their other book).
From the site:
“Citizen Marketers” is a trend book that examines the early history of social media and its implications for business marketing.
Good stuff! If it fits into your curriculum, take advantage of the opportunity!
Exciting times for education.
As a teacher/techcoordinator, I was thrilled to go to IL-TCE every year. That was my ‘treat’, and the only conference I could count on. If grant money came through, a trip to NECC was an extra special treat.
In the last month, I have been to FETC, an internal Discovery conference, hosted the DEN Virtual Conference, METC, and PETE&C.
Yeesh! And the last time I checked, ‘travel’ still wasn’t even listed in my job description. However, as exhausted as I am, I do have to admit that it has been a fantastic month. It’s given me the chance to get a ‘taste’ of the state of education all across the country. And I have to admit, I feel pretty darn good about the state of education on the whole.
When you go to a conference, you always find people who are excited to be learning new things. That’s nothing new. But what I’m seeing more and more often are educators who are taking things into their own hands and not letting obstacles get in their way. In the last 30 days I’ve met hundreds of educators who have decided not to let things like NCLB prevent them from doing what’s right for students. Who have realized that sometimes the best way to enact widespread change is to start with your own classroom. Who have made an active commitment to sharing the things that they are learning.
I’ll be honest, for a while I was starting to get pretty pessimistic. There are still thousands of educators who have no idea what a wiki is. But that’s OK. What I’m finding is that the vast majority of those people have recognized that they need to understand what it is, so they determine if it fits into their own curriculum. More and more educators are joining online communities, and the people that have are turning around and dragging their colleagues in with them.
In short, I’m seeing signs that the educational community is changing at a much more rapid pace than I’ve ever seen before. Does that mean that we’ll be seeing wholesale widespread change in the next year or two? Probably not. It’s clearly an uphill battle. But the right conversations seem to be popping up everywhere. And best of all, they’re being documented and shared throughout the world.
It truly is an exciting time to be an educator.
Ah’m back.
Ever go two months without posting a blog post? And then you start feeling a ton of pressure to write something really good explaining why you haven’t? Maybe, some sort of post that summarizes all the things you’ve been up to, why you’ve been SO busy, and justify your lack of activity?
Of course, I think the best way to get over the hump is to just post something. Anything.
Even a pointless post like this!