Category Archives: Twitter

From the Twitterverse: How to Be Less Distracted

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I am sitting in the living room, laptop on lap with 10 tabs open in Chrome, American Masters program about Woody Guthrie on the television, husband streaming a local government meeting. One of the tabs is TweetDeck…it’s Tuesday and so the blog post is about something I find on Twitter. This article form Edudemic seemed perfect: How To Be Less Distracted by Technology.

It includes 25 suggestions for how to reduce distraction, many of which include technologies. Interestingly enough, TweetDeck is one suggestion as it helps make Twitter a more efficient time killer.

The two suggestions that I need to practice are setting a limit on email checking and not opening up more than 3 or 4 tabs. I always have email open in a tab and watch the count, immediately clicking on the tab when the number changes. As for the tabs, I’m not sure how I end up with all those tabs…quick searches, clicking on Twitter, email and Facebook links, doing Google searches. I’ll look up to find 15 tabs open, some of them repeats. The article links to this great graphic from the Googley Gooeys, featuring five signs that you’ve opened too many tabs. All five signs apply to me, especially the ones about forgetting what you were doing in the first place and closing the important tab.

The suggestion for email is to only check it twice a day…I’m honestly not sure I could do that. If I were going to try, I feel like I should announce it since my colleagues have gotten used to often getting immediate responses from me, using email almost like chat.

Meanwhile, I can recommend the Woody Guthrie episode of American Masters…

 

 

 

Surrounded by Community

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I spent most of yesterday online with educators, exploring the meaning of community.  Several hours were spent in Elluminate as part of Powerful Learning Practice‘s ongoing professional development program.  From there, I moved to Second Life for VSTE’s weekly meeting where we explored educational groups.  We ended the evening with a snowball fight and, as you can see from the picture below, I dressed for the occasion.  (Always wanted to have wings!)

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I just felt energized the whole day, having access to all these fellow travelers without having to leave my house!  We shared both professional and personally; we learned; we had fun. It was the kind of experience I would wish for learners of all ages.

Besides being reminded of the power of online community, I learned some specific content.  I was introduced to Google notebook, a tool I had not explored before.  I installed it and was eager to try it out this morning.  So, I logged into Twitter, knowing that someone would have a link to a good article to read.  Twitter has increasingly become a big part of my virtual learning community in a way that I could not have imagined when I first joined.  I was not disappointed this morning as Will Richardson had posted a link to a New Yorker article on teacher quality from Malcolm Gladwell.   My primary job right now is working with pre-service teachers and identifying good teachers is always a concern.

I read the article and, as Will suggested, skimmed the football stuff.  When I got to the first paragraph that was really about education, I discovered that it had already been highlighted by someone else, using Diigo.  I moused over to read the comment and discovered it had been made by Michael Scott, who I had just seen last week in Roanoke and who is a member of the VSTE Ning.  I took a break from reading to add Michael as a friend in Diigo.  The next highlight and comment came from Clay Burrell, a fellow Twitterer whose blog, Beyond School, is always thought provoking.  All I could think of is what a small world it was since, according to the Internet World Stats, there are nearly 1.5 billion people online these days.

I think the lesson here is that online is a real community, as real as the face to face community I enjoyed at last week’s conference in Roanoke.  It’s something my non-networked friends just don’t understand.  And it isn’t something that happened overnight either.  But it is part of my life now, and as I sit at my desk working alone from home on a rainy day, I feel the presence of that community.  Thanks to you all!

Community Made Visible

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I tend to be a loner.  I like to do things on my own, including learning.  Given a choice, I would always choose to work alone on a project or learning activity.  I’m comfortable in my own company.  Working from home has only exacerbated that tendency.

But, yesterday, as I headed out to vote and then, later in the evening, as I waited for the election returns, I found I wanted to share with others besides just my husband and the dogs. And, happily, there was my online community.  Over the past year, I’ve made an effort to become a more active participant in that community, and last night, almost for the first time, I could really see that it at work, mostly through Twitter.  During the day, we exchanged voting stories, how long the lines were, how we felt about what we had done.  Many people posted pictures and videos.  Then, as the polls began to close, we gathered to share our anxieties, to celebrate the milestones, and, finally, to take a deep collective breath as we realize what had just happened in our country.

Looking back, I can’t point to a specific moment when I joined the community.  It’s been a gradual process, one that I suspect will continue.  One positive step I’m taking is to do more with this weblog by following along with Teach42’s 30 Days To Being a Better Blogger.  I’ve only gotten through the first challenge, to update my About page.  I was surprised to discover that it was woefully out of date, like from 2006.  My other plan is to do more reading and responding to others both as comments and as blog entries as a way of making connections.

Another step is going to do more with the Ning community I’ve chosen.  I’m a member of VSTEOnline.  This semester, I had my pre-service teachers sign up.  They’ve been doing a great job posting their ideas and questions and interacting both with each other and the other Ning members.  Sad to say, I haven’t done much except monitor their progress.  It’s time to make this community a priority.

It is easy to get distracted by multiple communities, something John Hendron recently wrote about, so I’m going to try to focus my energies.  I’ll still Twitter, of course, since I’m rapidly discovering how much I’ve come to rely on those little updates from my tweets, and just last night welcomed several more friends to my Twitter world.

Thanks to all of you who make up my learning network…some of you know who you are, others have no idea. (But I’ll be sending out a few thank you notes so you may find out soon.)  Together, we are living, learning, and growing together!

Add Your Voice to THIS Conversation

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Here’s why I love Twitter: I came upon this great conversation about using technology in education. Two very smart, thoughtful practitioners are exploring the role of tech, but also thinking about education in general. I’ll do a quick summary but you really should read the full posts:

Here’s the post I read first and that came through Twitter: Nancy Flanagan cautions against seeing technology as the answer to everything in education, and in her role as a music educator, makes a passionate plea for live, group performance:

I also know that an elegant, powerful school lesson may be as simple as reading aloud and talking, and that there are some execrable projects posted on Voicethread. The teacher who does not instill rigorous principles of editing, evaluation and content synthesis in conjunction with use of Web 2.0 tools is in many ways worse than the teacher who has not moved past the overhead projector—when the excitement of having kids’ work available to the world wears off, we may be left wondering what, exactly, they have learned.

I nodded my head when I read this: I read some 4th graders’ blogs this week, and while I applaud their use to encourage writing, many were littered with grammatical and spelling errors. Sorry, it’s the old English teacher in me who thinks you should polish work that you’re going to publish. I know blogs have a more informal reputation–and even as I write, I hope you don’t go back through my own posts to find errors that I know are there–but I think this is a place to hone technical skills as well as encourage writing. Most blog software has a draft function built in so students could do peer editing. So, I’m with you, Nancy. And, as a life long musician, I believe group live performance does offer a different insight into collaboration than a wiki or discussion forum.

Bill Ferriter over at The Tempered Radical gently disagrees with Nancy and he goes on to make an interesting point about what we personally hold dear:

I’m beginning to wonder whether or not our aversion to instructional technology is really more a result of the pleasure that we take from our own approaches to learning. Is it possible that we see “the best” learning as the way that we learn best?

Do we inherently (unintentionally?) discredit new forms of learning because they don’t remind us of what we value the most in the teaching and learning process—or because the final products aren’t the kinds of final products that “look right” to us?

I don’t know that Nancy is clinging to live performance as an outmoded type of learning, but rather suggesting that we make sure we don’t abandon everything from the past before considering its possible value in our rapidly changing world. Yet, I understand Bill’s fundamental argument: change is tough and gets tougher as we get more entrenched in our own favorite practices. I would suggest that one way to help teachers move past this is to provide ongoing, professional development that encourages teachers to do exactly what these practitioners are doing: having an in depth conversation about the issues they face.

I’ve really enjoyed reading these teacher leaders. In a side conversation, Bill and Joe Thompson are discussing the role of technology in their own lives and I found myself nodding again about the difficulty of achieving what Bill calls “digital balance.” After I finish this blog post, I’m going outside to work in my garden for an hour.

I think what I appreciate the most is their willingness to be honest about technology in their own lives and in education. Bill points out that this isn’t an either/or discussion and Joe reminds us that there are many gray areas. So, chime in here: what role should technology play in education? Or in your own life? How are you making decisions about what technology you will use and how you will use it? How do you find the digital balance in both classroom and life?

Morning Musings

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I usually reserve morning blogging for my personal blog, but I have a few tidbits to share.

Netvibes Universe: Finally, Netvibes has created a way to make a public page. Here’s mine. It was fairly simple to move whole tabs between my personal and my public Netvibes.

Twitter Troubles: I follow several blogs by librarians. Remember, I like anything that combines books and the web, and librarians are all about books. Of course, now they are also about all forms of media, but I will always associate them with the big brick building on Duke Street in that housed the Lancaster County Public Library, my first library. I was surprised to find this post from Steven Cohen at Library Stuff about taking a Twitter break after evidently offending someone with his Twitter posts last week. It is a reminder that Twitter is different from bantering with our friends at the bar. It is public and we may not always know all our followers. But, does that mean we have to worry about offending them? If you aren’t happy with my tweets, stop following me. Hmm…another one of those dilemmas of social networking that I think we will each have to work out in our own way. But, at the least, we should be having conversations with our kids about how to use these tools to build stronger relationships.

More Books on the Web: Chris O’Neal and I posted a blog about books and social networking software over at Spiral Notebook. Of course, if you know me, you know that I wrote about LibraryThing. Last evening, I stayed up late to work on planning a trip to England. I was mostly working on the London bit: don’t want to miss any of the famous literary sites like Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey. In poking around, I found a great website called “Get London Reading.” The goal of the program, which began in 2006, is to get Londoners to connect to the literary past of their own city. They produced a lively, well-written “Rough Guide” to the London literary life. It includes information about the authors that have called the city home and also highlights books that have drawn their settings from London. I spent a very fruitful few hours reading it, wishing I had more time to read, and putting markers on my London map. I also wished, just for a moment, that I was back in the high school English classroom where I could incorporate Google Maps into our study of English literature.

Here’s the map so far:


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