** TWITTER STATUS UPDATE: The site seems to be running as normal again!


As teachers, educators, students and administrators in education, we need to use a variety of tools to get the job done. Classroom 2.0 Ning Network is one very important (hugely important) tool. But there are more out there that need to be harnessed and exploited in the interest of pedagogy.

I just did a search at Twitter.com (search is a relatively new and powerful feature on Twitter) and only found 3 teachers when "classroom20" was set as the search key work. THREE!!!


So, please let's fix this. Including me ... networking is one (of many) of the most exhilarating uses of Twitter

With Twitter you can:
1. network with others and get immediate responses with sharing ideas and resources
2. use Twitter in a zillion ways with your students to advance learning, higher order thinking skills, critical thinking skills, communication skills, creativity skills, etc.)
3. Get SMS cell phone notification from only those "followers" that you give permission to (very useful when working on a special project with a small group of colleagues).

So, here is what we all need to do.

1. Open a twitter account (http://twitter.com) if you yet do not have one (and every person wanting to stay informed and share really should)

2. Be sure to (a.) insert the word classroom20 into your profile bio or (b.) use your classroom20 my page URL in your twitter profile website field (or just http://classroom20.ning.com if you prefer)

Give twitter a day or 2 to index you in their search engines and then VOILA! .. You can enter the key term "classroom20" into the onsite search engine .. then just click "follow" for each person that you want to add to your network.

If you add me (my twitter is "metaweb20" please add me) for example .. then I will receive an email notification ... I use those to see who added me .. and then I usually add them too (if they don't look too weird, hehe).

I use twitter with a large group of edtech and edublogs bloggers and I can assure you that it is a fantastic resource. Many of you here already know this. But, we have had to find each other 1 by 1 by reading blogs and such.

Let's do it. I will run a twitter search in a few more days. It will be interesting to see how many will be there beyond those 3 shown above.

Frank
blog: http://franksblog.edublogs.org
twitter: http://twitter.com/metaweb20
article: How to Use Twitter in the Classroom

Tags: microblogging, twitter

Views: 532

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Of course ... on the night of the same day that I launch a huge twitter promotion here at classroom 2.0, twitter has the worst episode in their history ... which continues today. So please ignore this post for a couple days until they get things in order .. here is what they say on their blog.

" Thursday, January 31, 2008
We had a rough night. But now we're back.
I just left the office, at 6am, with most of our engineering and technical operations team. That's only a handful of people, but we were all there all night.

You may have noticed we had an outage last night/stretching into this morning. This was a planned maintenance project, not a surprise happening for us. But we did go far beyond our planned time window, which sucks. What sucks more is the series of outages (planned and not) we've had lately. We know this makes Twitter frustrating to use, and we want you to know, we hear (and share) your frustration and are working really, really hard to fix it.

The good news is we finished a major infrastructure project tonight, which we've been working on for months and that we think is going to help a lot. I'm sure there will be some glitches in the coming weeks, but we've laid some important foundation that's going to help us build toward the future.

Thank you for your support and patience.

Update (8:30a PT): We're still experiencing patches of slowness service-wide. Some of our systems are not cleanly restarting. We're watching closely, bringing things back up manually, and fixing our automation tools accordingly!"


Okay, I have updated my twitter ID = murcha
So Frank, how did you do your search? What heading did you go to, to find the fellow tweeters on classroom20?
You can follow me @ hockeymom1788
I have found some great links/resources through Twitter especially since I started following more people and more people are following me. Someone told me to really benefit from Twitter the magic number is 150. I can't imagine trying to keep up with that many tweets! I found out yesterday, from someone on Twitter, that BarackObama is on Twitter. Pretty cool to get an email that says he's following me! lol
I Did it! twitter ID: susant.

Just a word of warning - there is a Spanish site which is "hijacking" Twitter and Jaiku feeds, presenting Twitter and Jaiku users as though they have signed up for their dating site. They have our usernames, photos and feeds which they are putting together with bogus "About Me" information. In order to prevent them hijacking more of my feeds I have made my updates private.

You can read more about this here http://www.classroom20.com/xn/detail/649749:Topic:105305
Okay, I just added you to my twitter network and Classroom20 to my my bio. I also joined MyBlogLog. Couldn't figure out how to save a screen capture of my blog as a jpeg. Can you share a tip for that?
I'd use ctrl and prtscn, then copy image to Powerpoint to crop to correct size, then open in Paintshop Pro and save as a jpeg.
Alternatively, I've seen stuff about using Kwout - haven't tried it but might work!
Lisa aka @lisibo
I'm on twitter at http://twitter.com/kolson29
I still get the same 3 people in the "classroom20" search at twitter. Kate .. I just enter "classroom20" into the search box on your home tab page (middle of page in right column) ..

twitter must be so busy taking care of their other issues right now that they aren't indexing the site. I can't even get my own profile returned in the results .. and I added the word "Classroom20" to my profile bio when I started this thread. The last time that I complained about search results being unreliable to twitter support .. their response was to add me to the search engine manually ... then I did indeed start showing for "Morelia" but then my friends did not ... they said they were going to fix their search engine .. but I guess they haven't gotten to it yet .. that was months and months ago.

I'm really surprised that they haven't fixed it ... as it renders search unreliable and somewhat useless.
Frank,
Have you tried using www.terraminds.com to do the search? Also try Classroom2.0 - I think that is what I did.
-Liz
Liz .. thanks for terraminds ... sort of like tweetscan.com ... but it also has search users, which is perfect. But the thing is that twitter own search does this too. The only problem is that they are not indexing all the records. Let's do a test.

tweetscans though has a cool feature where it will email you (daily, weekly etc) for any new search catches based on a variety of key words. Pretty cool if you are doing research and want to be notified by email of any twitter activity .. which is always rich with links and such!

My twitter bio: Classroom20, 21st Century Teachers. Visit META at http://metamexico.ning.com

Your twtiiter bio: I am an educator who strongly believes in the power of technology. Proud member of Classrom2.0 on NIng.

If you search USERS for "ning" ... both of our profiles appear ... but if you search on "classroom20" or "classroom2.0" you get nothing (in terraminds) .. but if you search on just "classroom" we appear .. but with everyone using the generic word "classroom" ... if your search on "classroom20" in UPDATES and not USERS then you get all the results with exactly "classroom20" ... so the search results are inconsistent in terraminds between data sets. Arrrggh!

And for the last 2 days the search feature at twitter has been disabled (for me anyway) .. so maybe they are listening and taking care of these inconsistencies.

But, thanks for terraminds .. it gives more options that tweetscan.
http://twitter.com/johnbrasil

Just searched but it still only shows three people from classroom20 even though loads here have added themselves lol
added "classroom 20" to my twitter profile

http://twitter.com/ccassinelli

Let's get networked: http://voicethread.com/#q.b67978.i350123

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