Twitter-ific!!

A few ideas here on how to use Twitter in the classroom …

I have been trying for the last year or so to get more into Twitter.  I tend to keep Facebook for my personal life and Twitter is more based around my professional life.  Now I think that could be my problem with Twitter.  Not many of my friends are on Twitter, whereas I have quite a lot on Facebook so when I have a spare minute I will check on Facebook to see what my friends are doing.  I don’t get that same enticement with Twitter.

So what do I like about it?  I like that I can follow anybody and it is completely up to me who I follow.  Twitter keeps me up to date with what is going on in my areas of interest.   So who do I follow?  A few friends, celebrities, colleagues and fellow students for my personal life and a few tutors, fellow students, IT and e-learning professionals and companies for my professional life, plus a few news sites etc for general information.

I thought I would ask my followers what they like about Twitter to show you how interactive, responsive and useful a tool it can be …

https://twitter.com/Jubaru/status/134013127732899840

Unfortunately I only got 2 answers  …

https://twitter.com/josieharvey02/statuses/134027264739377152

https://twitter.com/SueFolley/status/134030663606214657

But this was a quiet evening – I don’t know why but nobody seems to be online tonight.  Usually I would have expected a few more responses than this.  But answers to your questions can be immediate.  Students in a classroom can tweet an answer/comment/question to their tutor which can be shown on a screen for the class to see/discuss.  Students outside a classroom can tweet for help, suggestions, links, videos … whatever they find.

Twitter is a fantastic resource that is constantly changing – to me this is the sort of interactive dynamism that Sabry and Barker must have been referring to in their article – you just need to make sure you follow the right people.

RSS – is it worth bothering???

I have done a fair bit of trogging around the internet tonight – troggin’ and bloggin’  🙂 looking for ways to use RSS feeds – specifically in education, but anywhere really.

So what has my trogging found?  Not alot that isn’t already pretty obvious.  The best way to use RSS feeds is the one that I set up the other night: set up Google Reader (other readers are available) with blogs, wikis, news sites etc that are of interest to you.  This is a good way of sharing resources, particularly if you are in a blogging community such as ours.  The way that we are using our blogs and RSS feeds is creating our very own online community of practice but that is very much a conscious effort on our part.  If we were studying a different course that didn’t include e-learning, would we still be as interested in our little community?  If we weren’t being assessed on our blogs would we be as active as we are?  I don’t believe that blogging would create a CoP on its own in many other settings TBH.

So what other uses of RSS feeds have I found?

My favourite one is from one of the RSS websites:

10. Study Guides
Many websites that are focussed on studying. Have created RSS feeds that contain daily questions. There are feeds for “word of the day” or “problem of the day”. Students can subscribe to the feed and integrate long term studying into their daily routines.(http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-and-education.htm)

That could be a really useful tool – set the students a small task each day/week.  But that could be done via all kinds of other tools; Twitter, VLE, email and so on.

Another idea is to convert an RSS feed into an audio feed.  I found this in a SlideShare Powerpoint:

RSS in Education

The slide of interest to me is number 23 “Auditory Learners Rejoice”.  I quite like the idea of being able to convert your RSS feed into a podcast, but having said that you could just do a podcast in the first place.  It could be handy for some students with disabilities though.

So, on the whole I like RSS feed and it can be useful but it isn’t going to rock my world.  I don’t feel sufficiently inspired to use it in any other way than following you guys on this course.  Personally I prefer Twitter for my newsfeeds; I like diversity, the conversational aspect, the interactivity that Twitter offers.  I like to see a list of tweets and to choose which ones I open up to delve into further.

The two tools are very different, but can be used for the same purposes.  Geekpreneur has listed similarities and differences between the two here whereas Daniel Scocco has listed how Twitter is better than RSS here so I will leave you to decide what you think of the two.  But please let me know … 🙂

RSS Feeds

I think I might finally get RSS feeds!  I first encountered them a couple of years ago and had a bit of a play using iGoogle (not realising the difference between iGoogle and GoogleReader) and was pretty unimpressed.

So far I have been trogging through everyones blogs trying to work out if I have already read them or not – but now I can see straight away what I have read and what I haven’t using Google Reader.  Me likey.  Having said that I liked delicious when I first tried that but the novelty soon wore off.  We’ll see if it wears off with Google Reader as quickly.  I will try to come back to this in a week or so and will let you know (I bet you can’t wait!)