Twitter Freaks

February 2010 | Volume 67 | Number 5 Meeting Students Where They Are Pages 73-74 Why Teachers Should Try Twitter William M. Ferriter I've got an embarrassing confession to make: Until recently, I wasn't convinced that differentiating learning opportunities for students really mattered. Like many teachers, I would deliver one lesson each day, keeping my fingers crossed that I met everyone's needs. And even though I've always had a sense for the strengths and weaknesses of my individual students, I rarely drew on that knowledge to make specific changes in instruction or assignments.

Dank dem Dienst Twiangulate können diverse Auswertungen zu Twitter Accounts erstellt werden. So kann man sich schnell und einfach einen Überblick über gleiche Interessensgruppen oder Freundeskreise der einzelnen Tweeter schaffen.

Create PDF e-books of your tweets and favorites.

Last week Erik Qualmann posted a list of "All Star Social Media" players in his ClickZ column. Being included in such a list with the likes of Chris Brogan and Scott Monty was humbling to say the least.  Erik qualified the list by saying they were mostly people he knew and he welcomed suggestions.  I noticed few women were mentioned and knowing there are so many power players, I decided to create a list of my own featuring women that I think "rock" the social web.

I look at a bit of theory behind twitteruse

For new or inactive Tweeps

the homepage for Twitoaster conversation service - I'm taking a look at this. Still loving hootsuite but sometimes conversations can be hard to follow there.

BlastFollow enables you to follow Twitter users who share your interests en masse. This web site is a production of Triangle Information Solutions. To use BlastFollow, simply enter a favorite hashtag (for example, "americanidol") in the box below. Then, click the "Get Users!" button. After a few seconds, you will see the number of users who tweeted with that hashtag recently. Then, you need only enter your Twitter name and password and click "Blast!" You will start following all of those users. You can usually see the progress on a user-by-user basis.

"In a recent conversation, I was asked what I thought about twitter as a learning tool. Over the course of the past few years I've moved from saying "I don't get it" - to feeling like it's a good addition to my Learning Tool Set. But I also think that there's a lot more help now around how to make effective use of Twitter as a learning tool. I thought it would be worthwhile to pull together these resources."

Twitter's default search only goes back a week-if that-and often chokes on multiple keyword searches. Fortunately, there ARE many great alternatives, and I've included a chart comparing the nine top tweet search engines below. Here are links to each of the nine,  in order of what I've found most useful to least useful for general tweet searches (however, some are powerful in other ways)):

Tip of the Week - 65 History Twitter feeds