Group items tagged

"Use pngWriter when you have more to say than will fit in a tweet, without making it hard on your readers (or you). It's better and easier for everyone."

"Tom Bennett says never mind the bloggox - the Matrix is the new staffroom "

List and schedule for all the weekly Twitter chats

"The Tweet-o-Meter measures the amount of tweets (measured in Tweets per Minute or TPM) received from various locations around the world. The guages are updated every second giving you a live view of the TPM's in each location."

I use TweetDeck. It is a useful tool for following along during a Twitter chat as it allows you to build columns that help to keep track of the many different feeds, notifications, mentions, etc.
It can be difficult to check out the resources shared and keep up with it all. There are many methods for 'saving' the resources shared. Kelly Fitzgerald @LISDTechie uses the collections feature in TweetDeck to gather those resources to review at a later time. Here she offers advice about how to add a collection and start saving those wonderful resources people are sharing.

"Here is a virtual way for New Zealand educators to reflect on, record and share their own learning."
Repository for Hangouts, presentations and links from the online Teachmeets in New Zealand.

"chat on twitter in real-time."
Good way of monitoring and participating in Twitter chats

"#Grammar911 is a hashtag that the @EduMinions (my class) will be using to learn about appropriate grammar and punctuation when posting online."

"A CYBER safety expert has slammed primary schools for letting students as young as eight use Twitter. Roxburgh Homestead Primary School is one of a number of schools to set up classroom Twitter accounts so students can share snippets of their work with the outside world. Parents have been encouraged to 'follow' the accounts for an insight into their children's school life."

"This may be overstating or overthinking the situation. Twitter is just a website. Yet, I can point to many opportunities, jobs, and (most importantly) friendships that sprung from it. Some married friends met on Twitter. It's tempting to give an importance to the service for those of us who joined early and were able to reap these benefits, but that doesn't mean Twitter needs to stick around forever. It matters. Or mattered. To me, I'm unsure which just yet."

This offers some research-based evidence about how Twitter can be useful to educators.
"In order to convince teachers of the possible benefits of using a new technology, such as Twitter, we decided to look for evidence of its qualities. What in particular, does Twitter offer educators? Is it worth getting involved?"
30 leading educators (with an interest in educational technology) were identified. They were the ones who were currently using Twitter. The study analysed samples of their tweets in order to determine their purpose and the possible benefits of the tweets to their followers. Also examined were a sample of tweets from the twitter streams of two popular educational hashtags: #edchat and #edtech, in order to determine what 'followers' may gain."

A useful guide to hosting or joining a Twitter chat, as well as some description of some of the different Twitter tools available

"Siftlinks is a service that monitors your friend stream on Twitter, pulls out the links and creates an RSS feed for you to peruse at your leisure"

via @johnjohnston

"For businesses, being able to keep track of specific conversations on Twitter can be very important. While there are social media listening tools/platforms that can help you follow set conversations, there are ways you can achieve this on Twitter if you cannot afford to invest in a comprehensive social media listening platform itself. With the use of Advanced Search or a few tweaks to your normal searches on Twitter, you'll find you can really narrow down which conversations you focus on."

"Most educators who learn to use Twitter effectively say they learn more from their personal learning network (PLN) on Twitter than they've achieved from any other forms of professional development or personal learning. Unfortunately educators often dismiss Twitter, or fail to see the value of Twitter, when they're first introduced to Twitter. Our aim of this post is to provide all the information you need to learn how to use Twitter effectively as an educator. We regularly update this post with new information.  This post was last updated June, 2014."

If you enjoy being involved in Twitter chats you may sometimes find it difficult to keep up with the discussions - you might find that running a search for the appropriate hashtag and then refreshing the search just doesn't really cut it for you. If that's the case, you might want to explore TWchat They say of themselves: "Our public service allows you to create realtime chat rooms based on twitter hashtag. Invite users and perform the presentations online without any additional software! Add your friends or colleagues to help you with moderation."

"Social media offers some great opportunities for learning in the classroom, bringing together the ability to collaborate, access worldwide resources, and find new and interesting ways to communicate in one easily accessible place. Teachers around the world have found innovative ways to use Twitter as a teaching tool, and we've shared many of these great ideas here with you. Read on, and we'll explore 60 inspiring ways that teachers and students can put Twitter to work in the classroom."

Feedient is a free-to-use web application that provides a thorough overview of your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube feeds, all in one browser window. Feedient also lets you interact with these posts, and even lets you post to Facebook or Twitter (or both) directly from the application.

"Educators like to tweet! Out of the 1/2 billion tweets that post every day, 4.2 million are related to education, according to Brett Baker, an account executive at Twitter.com. To put this in perspective, while you read this past sentence, over 3,000 edu-related tweets have flown across the Twitterverse."