Twitter,+Twitter,+Twitter


 * Twitter Twitter Twitter **

After watching Del Harvey's TED Talk and Leslie Fisher's Webinar, share your views about Social Networking within the education setting. Be sure to reference information from the videos to support your thoughts. Please remember to use different colors and your name!

I found Del Harvey's TED talk very interesting. I know absolutely nothing about Twitter. I've never been on, I hear people talking about tweets and more, but I know very little. Therefore, I'm a bit nervous, as many educators are, about integrating Twitter and other social networking sites into my second grade classroom. My students are still so young and I wonder how parents would react if I was trying to bring Twitter into the classroom? As Del said, with something as huge as Twitter, a one in a million chance happens 500 times a day. That can be scary to think about. It's good to know that there are people like Del out there who are policing things, evaluating constantly, and as she said, visualizing catastrophe. When she spoke about image data, it was amazing to learn about how they have stripped the geo data out so that images are protected. While my weebly and blog are password protected, I often worry about any images that I post on the Internet of my students and I still feel like this is such a gray area (which is again why that AUG policy needs to be updated). I then watched Leslie's Webinar and after we got through the static, it was interesting to learn about how Twitter started as a day-long brainstorming session centered around just trying to get little bursts of information out. Watching some of the people that Leslie follows (Kathy Schrock!), I realize that I might be missing out on a lot by not being on Twitter and by following just a few people would be a great way to start, as Leslie says. I appreciated the way she spoke directly to some of us "newbie friends" because it really can be intimidating if you know nothing about it. After watching the second webinar, I felt like I knew more about how Twitter technically worked, however I was still wary about using it in the primary grades. So I did some more research and stumbled on this article about using Twitter in the early grades. I was amazed at how Ms. Lirenman, a first grade teacher in Canada, uses Twitter all the time and how it can have such a positive impact on learning in her classroom. They tweeted math stories and different ways of solving problems. They even tweeted an author of a book that they read in class and she tweeted every single one of them back! This article also includes some helpful tips for implementing Twitter in the primary grades for my Osgood friends! Check it out! Karen McDavitt []

I found both presentations quite interesting and informative. Deb Harvey's presentation was mind boggling especially when you stop to think about what a daunting job she has to do on a daily basis and the challenges both she and Twitter are up against everyday! Beyond challenging to me! I also enjoyed how Leslie Fisher spoke to us "newbies" to Twitter. I followed along with some of her setup steps and made sure to get Twitcam to tweet out pictures. I also liked her idea to have several Twitter accounts as an educator...personal, class, and professional! I jumped on that train right away! I think Twitter has such potential in a primary classroom for a variety of things. One way that I would like to try and use Twitter in my first grade classroom is to focus on the development of traditional writing skills and have my students become more engaged and involved in their own writing process. Twitter can be used as a way for students to demonstrate their knowledge of what we have learned in class or to reflect on our learning experiences and possibly to guide others outside our classroom walls. Twitter can also empower students to celebrate their learning and growth and "tweet" their "little bursts of" success to a specific audience. I would also love to use Twitter along with Twitpic to have my students develop another digital literacy skill like photography! We could upload photographs or drawings of what we have been learning which could then be automatically added to our Twitter stream. I bet first graders would love to see their work appear live on a Twitter Stream...parents too! There is so much more for me to learn about Twitter but I already love what I have seen, learned, and tried! To conclude, I think Twitter offers a meaningful way for students to use their emerging literacy skills in a new interactive and appealing way! Jennifer McPhillips

What I got out of both of these presentations was the issue safety. Obviously this was the focus of Del Harvey's Ted Talk. I think her point that 99.9% of all that goes on on Twitter is innocuous is an excellent point. Currently, as with many districts, our district has restrictions on teachers' interactions with students using social media. I believe that her point should make districts reevaluate overarching limitations on the use of social media. But, in order to do so we should consider what Harvey refers to as visualizing catastrophe. If districts worked to foresee problems and set up appropriate guidelines, while still allowing the use of this ubiquitous technology for educational purposes, it could be an integral and safe educational forum. As for the webinar, again, I think that the most useful information for educators were the ideas about how we can manage the tool (as opposed to just how to use it). Being able to make things private and the creation of separate accounts for specific purposes would go a long way in dealing with some issues that can arise from technology when used in an educational setting. The one aspect of Twitter that I did not know about prior to viewing this webinar was its ability to connect to websites and create live feeds and updates. Cool stuff! Mike Welch

Good takeaways Mike. Visualizing catastrophe can limit the growth when perhaps all that is necessary is to implement some protocols. Jennifer, good ideas for using Twitter in the primary grades and Karen, thank you for the link to use twitter at the primary levels.

Another unchartered territory for me…Twitter. I set up an account years ago and have never used it. I had no idea there were so many educational uses. I think it was Alan November that showed us the valuable educational resources and opportunities provided by Twitter. That was the first time that I thought I might be missing out on something, and therefore, so were my students. The issue of safety was paramount during both presentations. Del Harvey really spoke to my issues and concerns. Her TED talk was fascinating. I was blown away at the sheer scale of Twitter-500 million Tweets per day! How am I not involved in this? ;) I am very happy to know that there are people out there “visualizing catastrophe”, but my fear is that there is no way for them to think of and catch everything. It was actually nice to hear that the vast majority of Tweets out there are harmless. Leslie Fisher’s presentation was very helpful for us “newbies”, as she called us! I found out there are ways to manage Twitter so that students are protected. I now understand how to navigate the Twitter homepage and found out that it was much more organized than I thought. I particularly liked the tool to make a “list” that narrows down the people and topics that you are interested in, as well at the Twitpic feature for adding photos. I will take Leslie’s advice about starting slowly and will follow a few news organizations and educational topics. This will help get me started. I feel like I am a long way from using Twitter with my students but feel better about trying out the whole process. Karen, the article you posted was very helpful! Thank you! Stephanie DeLeo

** Twitter **
====** It was great to learn the security angle from Harvey, and the background with Leslie Fisher about Twitter. I‘ve tried getting involved with Twitter over the past 5 years or so, but haven’t really gotten “hooked.” I think that Fisher shares her Twitter use as similar to an RSS feed, which I have set up by using the TweetDeck, (as Alan November noted in his opening presentation last year). But it hasn’t become a daily habit for me. Searching in Twitter seems like a very useful and informative tool for educators, and students as well could benefit from finding information. It’s ideal that it searches all tweets, not just those you follow. #edchat is a great piece of information! Twitter lists look like a great way to narrow down the enormous “feel” that Twitter has; I could really see teachers using Twitter lists for collaborating and breaking down into classrooms for communicating. I liked the updates from Twitter onto the school webpage-owner of account is the only tweet that displays. This would be another great way to community with students, parents and the community. -Cassy **====

==== Well, after watching Lesley Fisher’s webinar, my Twitter page is now updated and I am following 14. Like Steph, I set up an account about a year ago, and then never did much with it. Funny enough, I set up my Twitter account to follow my children’s school district so that I could find out if they had school or not when we were without power for a week, during the big storm a year ago February. After updating and exploring Twitter, I found out that I could also follow each of my kid’s individual schools, town and school sports teams and breaking news both locally and world wide. I was so excited about it, that I set up an account for my husband as well! ====

==== While I am enthusiastic about using Twitter in my personal life, I have some reservations about using it in an early childhood classroom. Del Harvey is obviously working hard at the seemingly impossible job of removing the risk involved with using Twitter. However, the lack of privacy settings and the pace of incoming tweets makes me leery. I will say that after reading the article that Karen posted, I am willing to consider it, but I think it would involve a lot of supervision and monitoring on the teachers part. ====

Michelle Joyce
Debbie Hathaway I also found both presentations very interesting and without repeating what has already been noted by others I found it amazing to note that a 1 in a million chance happens 500 times per day with twitter. Even with 99.999% being harmless you are left with 150,00 questionable entries per month. The big take away for me is that twitter was created as a micro blogging source - specifically blogging without the shelf life. They only allow 1 twitter account per email.

The suggestions presented were when using a twitter account you should tweet 1/3 humor 1/3 information and 1/3 misc.

Much like others have mentioned here, I set up a twitter account a few years ago and was overwhelmed. I tried again after A. November demonstrated some of the educational uses for twitter. I still find it difficult to navigate.


 * Judy Ritts response to Twitter: **


 * Viewing Del Harvey’s video, “The Strangeness of Scale at Twitter” was enlightening. Her job with Twitter is to root out activities to keep users safe. This video helped me understand the role of scale in the ever-expanding digital world. The growth has been amazing in a very short time. She quoted that there 2 million tweets in 2009 per day as compared to 500 million tweets in 2014 per day indicating a 24,900 % increase. She clearly believes that the vast majority of activity on Twitter poses no risk to anyone. However because of the scale of Twitter the potential calamities happens with one in a million chance would in reality mean that it could happen somewhere 500 times a day. On Twitter because it is so very vast the ‘one in a million’ chance is pretty good odds. So, Del Harvey, in her role as protector has to assume the worse. I found it shocking when she showed the photo of her cat on her Twitter page, and then showed how geoinfo could lead someone to her exact location of where the Twitter was sent. So,Twitter realized they needed to strip the tweet from having geoinfo to keep tweeters safe. I wonder what Del Harvey does find on Twitter in the other than the 99.9 % tweets being sent daily. **


 * Viewing Leslie Fischer’s webinar left me somewhat baffled. I’m not sure why. I think until you actually tweet it’s hard to really get the power of what activity on Twitter can do to be helpful. I didn’t realize that it was a person’s tweet that first sent out the image and news of the plane crash on the Hudson River. Amazing. I did know that Twitter helped save lives when the Earthquake hit Haiti a few years back. As the tweets could be sent when other means of communicating were lost in the devastation. The word, tweet, seemed very appropriate in that setting – like little birds tweeting for help. I followed along as she talked about retweeting to spread a message, sending a direct message, searching, advance searching, using Twitter as a backchannel, having multiple Twitter accounts for different purposes. Yet I’m still not sure how I would use Twitter. I have signed on with an account – but I haven’t had time yet to try to learn how to use it. Hash tags still confuse me somewhat. I know they use them in the orange room on the Today show. I get that a hash tag is a # sign with a word…#golf. Yet, I still don’t really understand how the hash key turns it into a clickable link which creates a shortcut to a search. It was fascinating to learn that for educators, the #EdChat is at 12 pm and 7 pm (EST) on Wednesday to help teachers discover other educators worth knowing. Leslie talked about the capacity to create Lists to organize the people you follow and the Tweetdeck app to help achieve this task. Bit.ly an app to shorten URLs as a way to shorten, share and track your links; and Twitpic.com, as an app to keep track of all your photos. I’m not sure about Tweet ups. If I do become an active tweeter, I would want either Echophone or Twitterific for my smart phone. Her list of why educators would want to actively use Twitter was impressive. In conclusion, I recall that a few years ago, close friends of ours opened a new restaurant/bar in Cambridge called Mead Hall. It is located between MIT and the Cambridge Galleriea. They opened on a Wednesday without an advertising campaign…thinking let’s just do it – let’s open and see what happens. I went there on Friday evening and there was a wait out the door. I looked at my friend in amazement, and she replied, “Twitter”. All the MIT geeks were soo excited to have a new cool bar in their neck of the woods, that they tweeted all their friends. Pretty amazing, and true. There does definitely seem to be a place for the posting of short bursts of information that do not need to have a long shelf life in our current digital world of how people communicate with one another. **