Why Twitter @ School?

5 Real Examples of Using Twitter for Education

One of the best reasons to set up a Twitter account is because you have a real reason to share timely information with a real audience. For me, I have a Twitter account because I want to share with others when I have new blog posts and I want to read about when those I follow have new information to share. I also enjoy Twitter because my Twitter network always has lots of great ideas and advice to share and I also find that I have a lot of ideas and advice to contribute about educating innovatively with my Twitter network. Additionally, I find it to be a terrific tool for connecting with folks at conferences. Once the tag is set I can Tweet ideas with the tags and have others respond resulting in terrific conversations and deeper, more connected learning.

However many innovative educators want more than ideas. They want concrete people, ideas, examples, of those who are using Twitter and how it is being used in ways that appeal to them. So here are some ideas for those who need some Twitter mentors.

1) Tweet Shout Outs to Students and Teachers
At the Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School Mr. Brown tweets frequently. During the school year his Tweets often consist of shout outs to his students and staff. He has his Tweets embedded directly on his web page which has the added benefit of making the home-school connection. Students and families are always in the know of what is being celebrated and focused on in the school.
Visit: Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School

2) Tweet What is Happening in Your Library or in Your Classroom
Do what library media specialist Tracy Karas does. Create a page for your library, lab or classroom and Tweet your latest updates out to your students/visitors/school community. Tweet what's new, what's hot, what's not.
Visit: Marta Valle High School Library Media Center

3) Tweet at Conferences
Since I started Tweeting I have gained so much more from conferences! They have moved from a isolated (despite many people) experience, to an interactive, dynamic experience. Conference session become a conversation. Just find out the conference tag i.e. ISTE, BLC10, Educon, and send your tweet. See who else is responding to you or tag. In Twitter look at your @(and your name) tweets and look in search for the Twitter tag. You're on your way to processing knowledge and having a conversation!
Visit: ISTE Tweets or 140conf Tweets

4) Tweet During Lessons
I love incorporating Twitter into my lessons for teachers. To do this I share the Twitter tag with participants and ask them to Tweet before, during or after our time together depending on the task at hand. I provide the tag for Tweeting to give my students a place and way to share their thoughts and ideas. This serves as a great way I have specific times I check out the Tweets (i.e. work time) and when I bring participants back together we build on those Tweets.
Visit: This conference session on using cells or this session on using Twitter which I update depending on topic.

5) Give School Updates
Schools can set up a Twitter account and provide all the staff with the Twitter username/password. This makes every staff member on the beat reporters able to quickly share school news with the school community and the world. Teachers can Tweet themselves or assign a daily Tweeter in their class responsible for sharing the Tweet.
Visit: http://www.martavalle.org or http://cms.schooleffects.com/esheninger
Here's How to Get Started

• Set up your account
  There are two steps to follow to get started.

1. set up a twitter account
   
2. enable texting updates from your phone

• To use twitter from your phone go to www.twitter.com and set up an account.

• You can Tweet from your phone by entering your number at http://twitter.com/devices and entering Twitter into your phone with this number: 40404. Don't worry that it is only 5 digits. Just send a text to it and it will show up in your Twitterfeed.
• Users can contribute by simply sms texting anytime/anywhere from their phone.
• Embed your Tweets
  Once you are ready to begin Tweeting you'll want to embed your Tweets into your wiki, website, or blog as you've seen in each of the previous examples. To do this you can search your site's widgets or gadgets, or embed the html code into your site if you want a specific look and feel. Here's how.
1. Visit Twitter Widgets at http://twitter.com/widgets
2. Select Widgets for "My Website"
3. Select either "Profile Widget"
4. Customize Your Profile Widget
   Next you'll click on each of the following to indicate how you want your widget to appear on your site.
• Settings
• Preferences
• Appearance
• Dimensions
5. Now grab your code and embed it into your blog, website or wiki. Here's how to do this in three commonly used spaces.
   

• Blogger
• Select "design" -> "page elements" ->"add a gadget"
• In the "basics" menu select "HTML/JavaScript"
• Paste your code and save
• Congratulations! Your code is embedded
  
• Google Sites
• Select "edit this page" -> "insert" -> "more gadgets" -> "featured gadgets" -> "embed gadgets"
• Paste your code and save
• Congratulations! Your code is embedded
  
• Wikispaces
• Select "edit this page" -> "widgets" -> "other html"
  
• Paste your code and "save" your code
  
• "Save" your page
• Congratulations! Your code is embedded
  

Once you set up Twitter on your website, blog, or wiki you've begun the conversation and are able to start connecting to your audience in ways never before possible. So what are you waiting for? Start Tweeting becauseit's all about the conversation.

White Boards

Interesting Article on Interactive White Boards:

Willingham: The unrealized promise of whiteboards

My guest today is cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia and author of “Why Don’t Students Like School?”

By Daniel Willingham
Reporter Stephanie McCrummen wrote an excellent piece in The Washington Post on Friday on whiteboards in classrooms. The story said that a view is emerging that the large amounts of money schools are spending on instructional gadgets are not necessarily improving student performance.

Perhaps in an effort to be fair, she didn’t really go far enough.

Whiteboards are one of the few recent electronic innovations that have been well studied in the classroom. There have been ample opportunities for study because Great Britain has invested heavily in them--almost every school has at least one.

The outcome of those studies echo what the chief executive of SMART Technologies (a leading Whiteboard company) said: Teachers and kids say that they like whiteboards a lot, and both say that kids are more engaged in class because of the whiteboard. In fact, this effect is quite large--pretty much everyone who is in a classroom with a whiteboard thinks it helps a lot.

But that does not translate to better classroom performance.

A recent study sheds light on part of the problem. The researchers didn’t ask kids “does the whiteboard make class more interesting?” Instead, they asked kids, “Did you like your math class this year?” without referring to the whiteboard. They posed the same question to kids in classrooms with a whiteboard and to kids without one.

Kids who had a whiteboard in their class did like math class more, but the effect was puny--much smaller than when kids were asked about the whiteboard directly.

It seems, then, that kids like whiteboards very much. There is a powerful “gee whiz” factor.

But it doesn’t do much to make kids like math more, at least as whiteboards are currently used.

More generally, liking something that happens in school is certainly good--it’s hard to imagine a pedagogical method succeeding if teachers and students uniformly hate it! But liking it is not enough to ensure that it translates into better learning.

What is perhaps most remarkable in this story is that enormous sums of money are being spent on this (and other) technologies without correspondingly thorough and thoughtful professional development.

In many districts, the technologies have simply been plopped into teachers’ classrooms with minimal or no support. Little wonder that they are not being used as effectively as they could be.

Dismal as this start was, there are thousands of teachers who have made excellent, creative use of whiteboards and other “gadgets.” Prowl the internet for an evening and you’ll find the websites where they share what they have done and are doing.

How much Race to the Top grant money would it take to identify these teachers and give them a taller podium from which to broadcast their findings, and perhaps release time to conduct professional development for their peers?

Yes, yes, I know that these methods would be unproven in controlled studies. And sure, those studies ought to be done. But in the meantime, there the whiteboards sit in classrooms.

If the London bookmakers are interested, I’d like to put five dollars on home-grown professional development for whiteboards versus merit pay.

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By Valerie Strauss | June 14, 2010; 11:55 AM ET
Categories: Daniel Willingham , Guest Bloggers , Technology | Tags: educational technology, smart boards, technology in schools,whiteboards

QZAB Summer Construction Video Updates

Main Hallway Student Lockers Under Construction:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcEYPfEC_Mg

Student Lockers by Mr. Waldstein's Room Under Construction:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N93bdlPen9Q

Family and Consumer Science Room Under Construction:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R5ByoAZKd8

Science Lab Under Construction:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOJYRzNafLI

Lunchroom Under Construction:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7EGQNQqrnk

What Chief Executives Really Want.

by Frank Kern
Wednesday, May 19, 2010

provided by

A survey from IBM's Institute for Business Value shows that CEOs value one leadership competency above all others. Can you guess what it is?

What do chief executive officers really want? The answer bears important consequences for management as well as companies' customers and shareholders. The qualities that a CEO values most in the company team set a standard that affects everything from product development and sales to the long-term success of an enterprise.

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There is compelling new evidence that CEOs' priorities in this area are changing in important ways. According to a new survey of 1,500 chief executives conducted by IBM's Institute for Business Value (NYSE: IBM -News), CEOs identify "creativity" as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future.

That's creativity—not operational effectiveness, influence, or even dedication. Coming out of the worst economic downturn in their professional lifetimes, when managerial discipline and rigor ruled the day, this indicates a remarkable shift in attitude. It is consistent with the study's other major finding: Global complexity is the foremost issue confronting these CEOs and their enterprises. The chief executives see a large gap between the level of complexity coming at them and their confidence that their enterprises are equipped to deal with it.

Until now creativity has generally been viewed as fuel for the engines of research or product development, not the essential leadership asset that must permeate an enterprise.

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Needed: Creative Disruption

Much has happened in the past two years to shake the historical assumptions held by the women and men who are in charge. In addition to global recession, the century's first decade heightened awareness of the issues surrounding global climate change and the interplay between natural events and our supply chains for materials, food, and even talent. In short, CEOs have experienced the realities of global integration. The world is massively interconnected—economically, socially, and politically—and operating as a system of systems. So what does this look like at the level of customer relationships? For too many enterprises, the answer is that their customers are increasingly connected, but not to them.

Against that backdrop of interconnection, interdependency, and complexity, business leaders around the world are declaring that success requires fresh thinking and continuous innovation at all levels of the organization. As they step back and reassess, CEOs have seized upon creativity as the necessary element for enterprises that must reinvent their customer relationships and achieve greater operational dexterity. In face-to-face interviews with our consultants, they said creative leaders do the following:

Disrupt the Status Quo. Every company has legacy products that are both cash—and sacred—cows. Often the need to perpetuate the success of these products restricts innovation within the enterprise, creating a window for competitors to advance competing innovations. As CEOs tell us that fully one-fifth of revenues will have to come from new sources, they are recognizing the requirement to break with existing assumptions, methods, and best practices.

Disrupt Existing Business Models.CEOs who select creativity as a leading competency are far more likely to pursue innovation through business model change. In keeping with their view of accelerating complexity, they are breaking with traditional strategy-planning cycles in favor of continuous, rapid-fire shifts and adjustments to their business models.

Disrupt Organizational Paralysis. Creative leaders fight the institutional urge to wait for completeness, clarity, and stability before making decisions. To do this takes a combination of deeply held values, vision, and conviction—combined with the application of such tools as analytics to the historic explosion of information. These drive decisionmaking that is faster, more precise, and even more predictable.

Taken together, these recommendations describe a shift toward corporate cultures that are far more transparent and entrepreneurial. They are cultures imbued with the belief that complexity poses an opportunity, rather than a threat. They hold that risk is to be managed, not avoided, and that leaders will be rewarded for their ability to build creative enterprises with fluid business models, not absolute ones.

Something significant is afoot in the corporate world. In response to powerful external pressures and the opportunities that accompany them, CEOs are signaling a new direction. They are telling us that a world of increasing complexity will give rise to a new generation of leaders that make creativity the path forward for successful enterprises.

Frank Kern is senior vice-president of IBM Global Business Services.