This week's topic: twitter

Judy Gressel presented on Twitter. She began with a brief review of a previous presentation and stressed the ease of using Twitter and the importance of certain symbols like RT (retweet) , DM (directly messaging another person, # (for a keyword session) and @(to reply to someone). We talked briefly about using an image or icon and then more extensively about whom to follow. Separately we forwarded some KW/Phys Ed ideas to Andy. Mashable published suggestions on finding people to follow this week.

Judy also showed an example of a tweetdeck as a way to help organize your tweets. We looked at paper.li, too, especially the edchat version. That provides a “newspaper” look with an aggregation of tweets on a subject. Today’s has a link to a slideshare on 25 ways to use Twitter in the classroom. You can create your own personal paper.li, also, based on tweets from those people you are following.

Another aspect of our talk was how powerful and how “viral” this type of communication can be. Judy is still excited about watching the tweets fly by so fast that they could not be read on the day that Mubarak was removed from office.

In fact, I turned to paper.li after the meeting and saw this Video from the ASCD 2011 conference (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development). I am embedding it here since it discusses the “Best Practices in Social Networking for Educators”:

Our next meeting is Tuesday morning, April 19th at 7:30am in Jim Foster’s office. We will review several free tools which Erika Eich learned about at the ICE Conference.

In attendance: Raquelle Brennan, Erika Eich, Jim Foster, Judy Gressel, Andy Horne, Linda Straube and Matt Stuczynski.