Twitter+Vega

= Thing 13 - Twitter =

Post something you learned or a resource you found out about from reading your tweets. Please identify yourself as the poster. :) Bailey Dawson: I am very familiar with Twitter. I have been a member of Twiiter for over 3 years now. It happens to be very addictive. I offen find myself reading and posting "Tweets" all day long. I was initially against the use of Twiiter but I decided to give it a try and now I love it. You can use it at your own speed. You can use Twitter daily and you can use it once a year if you like. I really enjoyed the HelloSlide feature. This allows you to upload voice presentations and texts via Twitter. [|www.helloslide.com] C. Crawford says: I got some interesting information from Kathy Schrock's twitter page. She posted a video about Os X 10.8 Mountain Lion. This video explains the latest from apple. Mac users will now have some of the same capablities as the iPAD and iPOD touch. OS X Mountain Lion arrives this summer. This new advanced technology shows how innovations from iPad inspires the new features for Mac users. This is the 9th major release of OS X. Mountain lion includes Game Center, Notification Center, Documents in the Cloud, and new sharing capabilities Carol Stewart Twitter is alot like blogging or using wikis. Though I don't see its practical use for first grade. I like the fact parents can use it to communicate too. I like the way that you can receive information automatically which you may chose to ignore. I found out about Twerpscan., a security tool that can screen out unfriendly followers. This would be a concern for me and my students.

Sam Baillie says: I got the following information from https://twitter.com/#!/hdiblasi which took me to a blog post by Richard Byrne about the Youtube Channel: History for Music Lovers. Music has always been an excellent way to make learning more interesting and I love the embedded video on the blog. The neat thing about Twitter is how information is being brought to you (similar to RSS feeds) and you do not have to search for it - especially if you do not know what to look for! While I have used Twitter before (barely), it never occurred to me how I could use this in the classroom - other than making announcements about upcoming events at school.

Maggie Phillips says: From Kathy Schrock's Twitter, I found a really cool website called HelloSlide. At [|www.helloslide.com,] users can upload a presentation, add text, and the website will provide audio for the text. This site automatically generates audio for the text you write. It essentially gives voice to your presentation. You can use this resource free for up to fifty presentations. I found HelloSlide very user friendly and efficient.

Joy Rosser says: By following a tweet sent out by Howie Diblasi I was able to discover 3 new Google tools I had never heard of. The first tool is called Google Hangout. This tool allows you to have a virtual video (like Skype) from anywhere around the world. You can talk with up to nine people at a time. This is a great tool that allows for collaboration and students could easily use this while working on a group project outside of class. Google Hangouts also offers free conference calls. The second tool is called Google Translate, which is extremely fascinating to me. It is a great tool to use with Skyping with people from around the world who speak different languages. All you have to do is talk in your language and Google Translate will translate your speech to text and allows you to speak in any language you choose. Imagine have classroom buddies from any place in the world and not just writing letters, but actually seeing each other and communicating in each others native languages. The final tool I discovered is called Google Goggles. Google Goggles allows you to find out about any subject in the world. All you have to do is snap a photo of anything you want to know about. With this tool you could almost take a virtual field trip by finding out information on whatever you would like.

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Twitter is new to me and I am still trying to figure out how to navigate it. One resource that I stumbled upon was tweeted by Howie DiBlasi (@hdiblasi). Although I do not have an ipad in my classroom, I know that several of my classmates do and would appreciate this resource. Tech Learning posted and article titled [|Top 10 Apps for Digital Story Telling]. This article had a lot of awesome apps that can be used for students to write stories. Some of the apps cost $1.99-$2.99 but the majority of the apps were free. The apps allow students to create digital pictures or comics and add voice and writing to them.======

Leslie Maples says: I started a Twitter account about a month ago. It's not only fun but informative. Will Richardson who is the author of our textbook posted a link to a great article that he wrote that had already been tweeted 1,200 times. I figured it must be good. //[|Are You an Old School or a Bold School?]// is an article addressing going from a traditional school to a school that is willing to make changes.

Whitney Prather says: While I am not an overall fan of Twitter, this Learning Module did help me to acknowledge its value in 21st Century classrooms for students to practice the type of "short communcation" necessary for valuable social networking skills. I also appreciated the idea of educators using Twitter to form a "Personal Learning Community" to share and comment on resources and classroom practice. This week, my Twitter experience led me to a variety of useful tools. From Howie DiBlasi, I found the Cube Creator in readwritingthink.org. This resource allows students to create a "story cube" for various writing genres using a virtual graphic organizer that they can print out to create an actual cube! I believe this would positively support my struggling authors. [|www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/interactives/cube_creator/] From Kathy Schrock, I learned about a newly published book called, __The Classroom Teacher's Technology Survival Guide,__and I have already ordered my own copy! Will Richardson introduced me to [|www.soople.com/] which is a more specialized version of Google allowing users to search through specific categories for their needs such as video, current news, or music. Finally, I hope an article link from David Warlick on 10 Ways to Bring a Conference Back to Work will support me in efforts to effectively share knowledge from profressional learning days with my local school colleagues. [|learningcircuits.blogspot.com/2012/02/10-ways-to-bring-conference-back-to.html]

Tracy Efaw says: I wonder what kind of life Howie DiBlasi has. Did you all subscribe to his Twitter as we were instructed? What else does this man do?!! WOW!! :) Anyway, I like the short little snippets of information we get usually with some kind of link that we can check out if we want to explore an idea further. NPR, another Twitter I subscribe to tweets titles to articles with a link to the article. If the title sounds intriguing, I will click on it and read the full article. Howie tweeted an article that sounded interesting to me, so I read it. I liked it a lot. It's called " 21st Century Student Handbook: Teaching Today’s Web-Centric Kids" and the URL is []. I guess my next endeavor after I get my Masters is to take a speed reading course somewhere...there is just sooooooooooo much!