Twitter – Page 2 – ¡Vámonos!
 

Category: Twitter

Yesterday, as the European eTwinning Ambassadors PDW at National college of School Leadership in Nottingham drew to a close, I took part in what Drew Buddie aka @digitalmaverick entitled ‘a Teachmeet style-y thingy’.

Drew introduced the idea of an ‘unconference’ explaining both TedX and Teachmeet before opening the floor to others to share their 7 minute micro or 2 minute nano presentations.

I was first up – see the next post for my presentation – and later for a video of it (if it’s not too hideous!)

Other presenters were-

Lieven from Flanders who shared his magnificent projects, all documented on his blog. These included repurposing old computer mice, decorating them and then using TuxPaint to animate them (MouseArt), using Pivot to make animations of bubbles (B@llobees) and also to make animated characters @ni & M@te who travelled to other schools and found out about them.

Two things that particularly struck me were firstly when Lieven said he liked ‘making the unexpected valuable’ which struck a chord, and also the use of technology to back up and enhance more traditional methods eg the Kindergarten pupils made bubble pictures with paint and straws, and those pieces of art were used as the background for the Bubble animations.

Next up was Paddy who talked about his eTwinning project Wii will rock you which used the Nintendo Wii as a stimulus.  I enjoyed this presentation as Paddy underlined that it was not all about playing games, but that the games were the starting point for other activities – writing letters, designing CD covers, planning tours with travel plans and money considerations, cooperation with other children, publicity and negotiation.  They also worked on a joint sports day with a school in ireland with some ‘traditional’ sports day activities as well as Wii based ones.

Then Susi Arnott shared about using comic strips and Comic Life, and how the process of looking at comics enhanced the understanding of texts and enhanced literacy skills.  She mentioned Bitstrips which I will be investigating!

Drew used Twitter to ask why people went to Teachmeets- responses included:

‘the range of ideas’

‘a cross subject sharing of ideas’

‘non threatening’ collaborative spirit’

‘celebrating work done in my classroom’

‘meeting like minded colleagues leads to great PLNs’

‘at least 20 ideas for use tomorrow’

‘widens my ideas’

Nick Falk finished up the meet with a nano-presentation on the use of QR codes and QR readers in mobile phones.  Very interesting, and something I need to investigate!

No camel, no fruit machine and no alcohol; but otherwise pretty like a normal TeachMeet! Oh, and no cupcakes.  Sorry @niiloa

This evening I was very excited to be interviewed by David Noble aka @parslad as part of his PhD Edonis project – ‘an interpretivist study of the social web and PLNs’

Along with many others (there’s a list of my illustrious company here), I volunteered a while away to answer questions on my online learning and use of social media to help David with his research.  One of the things we all agreed is that we would be interviewed individually at some point during the two year process, and today it was my go.  I had the added ‘bonus’ of having my conversation broadcast live via iPadio.

I hope I answered David’s questions properly – I certainly talked a lot!  We talked about my online presence in various forms, especially Twitter, MFLResources Yahoo mail group and my blog, ¡Vámonos!, how my PLN was quite varied, and how sometimes it’s easier to ‘get on’ with people online although it’s good to meet face to face at times as well.

You can listen to the interview here


A while back – actually nearly two years ago – I became aware of a tool called Seesmic on which you could record video clips and others could respond by recording their own short clip. At the time, I used it to join in a few conversations and also to practice speaking Catalan / Mallorquin after a looong break. It was easy to do and fun as well.

I was asked last week by Chris Fuller to make a short video sharing my thoughts on using Twitter in the languages classroom and why it’s such a good idea in my opinion for a presentation he’s doing soon.
As I was home alone, I had to do it in a way that didn’t involve another person filming me, and my hand is unsteady at the best of times! I had never used the film option on Photobooth, and I was also concerned about delivering it to Chris via email in case the file was too large.
I had picked up a tweet at about the same time from Leon Cych asking for volunteers to be involved in a project this year called Remixing Education, and one of his methods of ‘recruiting’ was via Seesmic.
So, having been reminded of the existence of this site, and having recorded a response for Leon, I decided to use it to record my clip for Chris.
It’s very easy! Once you’ve signed up for an account, you press Create a video and start talking into your webcam (iSight camera in my case). Once you’ve finished you can review the recording and start again if you’re not happy. It’s then posted on the site – you can choose whether to allow it to appear on the public timeline or just to keep it on your page.
Once finished, I sent the URL and embed code off to Chris so that he could use the clip as he wished, editing it etc to his purposes.
I thought that would be that, but the ever eagle eyed king of RSS feeds, Joe Dale, picked up the clip on his radar and, having ascertained why I’d posted a clip to some mysterious ‘Chris’, blogged it!
And then I was astonished to receive a lovely response from a lady in Anaheim, USA who had seen the clip and wanted to tell me how good it was! A wonderful surprise and so exciting for someone unrelated to my life – real and virtual (Twitter, my blog etc) – to make such comments about my thoughts and ‘work’.
We all need a bit of encouragement sometimes, so thanks to Joe and Freida for giving me some to keep me going when I’m seizing up with all this cold ;o)


When I checked my counter this morning, it read 29,927. That set me wondering if I could possibly reach 30,000 by midnight to end the year off on a ’round number’!

I tweeted at one o’clock-

and then again (after prompting for a URL!) at 2 o’clock by which time I’d had another 30 hits!

I then went out to play in the park with my kids – resulting in ‘más morados en el culo’ – and was alerted by @wizenedcrone to my achievement :

Thanks to Fiona for taking the screenshot at the top and for alerting the world to my mishaps!

But joking aside, as the year draws to a close, I want to thank you for travelling with me through 2009 which has been quite a year – exciting, scary, inspiring, stressful, successful and unforgettable.

Gracias amigos xx
PS to my reader in Kazakstan – are you Borat?? To my Icelandic reader – can I come and visit? And to my reader in he Aland Islands – welcome – I must find out where they are!!
Lisa xxx
PS as I publish this, my counter stands at 30,087. Thanks for enthusiastically hitting me xx

If you missed last night’s Teachmeet EdTechRoundup, never fear! You can catch up by watching the archived stream.

The stream has been split into 12 parts – my bit is mostly at the end of episode 3 with a short bit (sadly cut short by being camelled) and follow on in episode 4 . I’ve embedded those episodes below – the rest can be found here. Well worth watching – loads of interesting presentations; something for everyone :o)




Twitter feed is here.
And Flickr photos of participants are here.

I’m currently watching a live Twittercam stream from Saltash School.

They have visitors from Cool Earth with them today, and are broadcasting live an interview with Javier from Peru who will be talking about living in the Amazon and the effect of climate change on his life and surroundings. Read more about it here.
Fascinating!!

Storybird – update!

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Further to my previous post about the wonderful STORYBIRD site, I’ve got good news and bad news!

The bad news is that, as the site is still in its infancy, if your story is written in a language other than English it cannot be published (ie put in the public gallery) as it cannot be moderated. As the site grows, this will change.
The good news is that you can still write stories and save them on the site, and that these can be shared via the ‘Send to a friend’ link.
Saira Ghani has just written a story too and I’m about to write another.
Here’s the Tweet conversation I had with @storybird
So let’s keep making stories and hope that the site grows at an amazing rate!


I had a visit today from Bren Taylor (AKA @edugame), Education consultant at Link2ICT, who wanted to have a look at how I used technology and especially social networking tools in the classroom to enhance teaching and learning.

He’d done his homework as he’d already seen my blog and the WCPS wikispace that I created as the next step for pupils to have their own area to showcase their work with me. We talked for a bit about previous projects and activities including replying to Ewan McIntosh’s tweet, and using Twitter to ask questions in RE before he saw a Spanish lesson with year 5.

Today we were starting a new topic – Yo soy músico. The first lesson involves learning a song based on I am the musicman, taking about instruments that you can play and also beginning to give opinions about music. So, rather than stick to asking the kids, I decided to use my Twitter mates to help me.

I sent out a warning tweet last night (before the football overtook me!)


so people knew to be watching out for my request today – and I actually got several answers last night at people would be busy this morning.

In the lesson, we talked about Twitter and how we might use it, and the kids were fascinated by looking at my page, and seeing how many followers I had – they were particularly impressed by my being ‘followed by’ Robert Llewellyn from Scrap Heap Challenge!

I showed them the answers we had received already and we were able to look at them and discuss different types of music – a good debate about how to define ‘alternative’ music – and also instruments like bodhran and the harp. Highlight of this section was a demonstration of masterful ocarina playing on the iPhone by Bren!!

There was a response in Spanish and I was able to read this with the class and, even before I asked them, they were decoding the meaning using all their LLS and KAL skills. Proud teacher :o)

We then posted our tweet and refreshed my replies after a minute to see that we’d already had one response, soon to be followed by another 7 or 8 over the next few minutes.



We used the responses later in the lesson when we were forming sentences in Spanish. Again,we used a tweet in Spanish already as a starting point, pickd out key words and then used the tweets in English to give us ideas of how we might respond to the question ¿Tocas algún instrumento musical? Pupils then worked in pairs to form their sentences; these were shared and the class commented on what was good about each example and ideas for improvement , e.g. word order; use of connectives; varying the instruments from ‘el piano’; using past vocabulary etc.

When asked if they’d enjoyed the lesson, many pupils said yes. And I could tell from their behaviour that the class were engaged. Definitely a thumbs up from class and teacher!

So, in case you missed it earlier –

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