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Some Social Media Search Tools I Like: I'll show you mine if you show me yours.

Here are some of the tools and apps I like for social media search. Got others? Twitseek: enter a URL, hashtag or keyword and it finds Tweets related to themHashtags.org tracks #hastags and also trends each one and shows you most popular ones Poll Everywhere lets you poll by SMS, Twitter or the Web in real-time. It replaces clunky audience response hardware at events and lets people use their phones to respond. Kikin kills me! It augments Google searches with relevant information from my social media contacts. So, if I'm shopping, I can get opinions, prices, see reviews and more, without ever leaving the product page. There's a good review on Techcrunch. Tweetscan Twitter search tool that updates every second and will send you emails when your keywords are mentioned, or let you back up your Twitter stream, which Twitter purges regularly Twitscoop searches and tracks search terms, can create a graph of results if there's enough data. It'll show the trend for your keyword activity/popularity Tweepsearch twitter profile and bio search by keywords Twitstat searches and also shows search trends Twitter Search (formerly Summize) isTwitter's own search engine, and the advanced version is very robust Backtweets : enter a URL and it finds Tweets that linked to it. Mr. Tweet recommends people to follow, communities to join, communities your friends and followers are in, and hot topics in communities. Tweetmi displays the most active Twitterers and top stories from the people you follow. So it's a personalized aggregation of your feed, displaying the the real-time conversation. One Riot is a real-time search engine that crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services, matches them to trending topics on Twitter or ones you search. Collecta does a real-time meta search on topics you choose, and, unlike most other search tools, saves your searches for future use.

Table 2: Personal learning environment toolset Web application (networked student component) Tool used in test case Student activity level of structure Social bookmarking (RSS) Delicious http://delicious.com/ Set up the account Subscribe to each others accounts Bookmark and read 10 reliable websites that reflect the content of chosen topic Add and read at least 3 additional sites each week. News and blog alert (RSS) Google Alert http://www.google.com/alerts Create a Google Alert of keywords associated with selected topic Read news and blogs on that topic that are delivered via email daily Subscribe to appropriate blogs in reader News and blog reader (RSS) Google Reader http://reader.google.com Search for blogs devoted to chosen topic Subscribe to blogs to keep track of updates Personal blog (RSS) Blogger http://www.blogger.com Create a personal blog Post a personal reflection each day of the content found and experiences related to the use of personal learning environment Students subscribe to each others blogs in reader Internet search (information management, contacts, and synchronous communication) Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/ Conduct searches in Google Scholar and library databases for scholarly works. Bookmark appropriate sites Consider making contact with expert for video conference Podcasts (RSS) iTunesU http://www.apple.com/itunes/ whatson/itunesu.html Search iTunesU for podcasts related to topic Subscribe to at least 2 podcasts if possible Video conferencing (contacts and synchronous communication) Skype http://www.skype.com Identify at least one subject matter expert to invite to Skype with the class. Content gathering/ digital notebook Evernote http://evernote.com/ Set up account Use Evernote to take notes on all content collected via other tools Content synthesis Wikispaces http://www.wikispaces.com Post final project on personal page of class wiki The process and tools are overwhelming to students if presented all at once. As with any instructional design, the teacher determines the pace at which the students best assimilate each new learning tool. For this particular project, a new tool was introduced each day over two weeks. Once the construction process was complete, there were a number of personal web page aggregators that could have been selected to bring everything together in one place. Options at the time included iGoogle, PageFlakes, NetVibes, and Symbaloo. These sites offer a means to compile or pull together content from a variety of web applications. A web widget or gadget is a bit of code that is executed within the personal web page to pull up external content from other sites. The students in this case designed the personal web page using the gadgets needed in the format that best met their learning goals. Figure 3 is an instructor example of a personal webpage that includes the reader, email, personal blog, note taking program, and social bookmarks on one page.

The personal learning environment can take the place of a traditional textbook, though does not preclude the student from using a textbook or accessing one or more numerous open source texts that may be available for the research topic. The goal is to access content from many sources to effectively meet the learning objectives. The next challenge is to determine whether those objectives have been met.