Tag Archives: twitter

How to write a weekly online roundup for staff

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try try try... I have noticed, and blogged about, the growth in weekly curated roundups that staff are writing, and publishing, for their teaching staff. This is how I do mine! Not necessarily the best way, or the easiest, or the most efficient, but it works for me!

I am Twitter on and off all the time, so I find Favoriting (sic) things helpful to remember to include them in the online roundup. I try and have a great image for each week, so I keep my eyes peeled for that quite a lot over the weekend!

I also set up a draft ‘Online Roundup’ page on my blog, and have that page open on any computer I have some free time with! This allows me to cut and paste straight onto the specific post , saving me the hassle of favoriting (sic) then re-finding the information.

I read the Guardian online on my phone, and this can provide articles for inclusion. If this is the case, I email them to myself, putting as the Header ROUNDUP.

Near the end of the week, I go through my Favorites on Twitter, either linking them, or ignoring them, and unfavoriting (sick!) as I go (to keep track). I try and categorise the different things I add to my roundup, so that busy staff can quickly locate something that interests them quickly, rather than feeling they have to wade through reams of writing (not that there usually is!). I also go through emails marked for the roundup.

I also acknowledge where the idea/thought/link came from. This is important! Provenance, people!

I send this out on a Friday afternoon now. I’m not sure if this is the best time or not. I used to send it on a Sunday night, but felt that perhaps I wouldn’t catch my staff at their most CPD-keen, although I could be wrong! I publish it on my blog, then paste the link into the staff email. I tried sending it with all the links, but my Gmail account thought bit was group spam and refused to send it! It also makes more sense to share it with everyone., rather than just my staff.

I retweet it over Friday evening and the weekend using the Buffer app. This allows you to write tweets in advance. I used to send out specific tweets, mentioning those who had contributed, but perhaps 1 in 20 had the courtesy to even acknowledge this, so I may not in the past. I think that it only takes a few seconds to say thanks to someone for giving them a credit, but may be unnaturally sensitive about this (probably!).

How do you write your Roundup? Is there a way I can improve my strategy? All ideas welcome!

Image: macwagen via Compfight

Online Roundup #almosteaster

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First Attempt In Learning by girlinbracesEach week, I collect together a range of articles, apps, reviews and tips that I have curated, collected and culled from the Internet (mainly Twitter), and send this out to the staff at my school. Here they are for this week:

 

Use in class

The Learning Event Generator gives you hundreds of ideas for activities to embed learning. If you ever have trouble trying to work out how to get a concept firmly across and into your children’s minds (and for me this can be daily), this is randomised inspiration. (via @LearningSpy).

Kinetic Typography is a fancy way of saying ‘moving words’ and if you type that into YouTube, prepare to be blown away. I’m a big fan, so was delighted to find this site on Google. Type in words, and the site generates moving words automagically. I had a play by putting in a poem, and Lovely Louis read the poem over my shoulder in the same moving style – how fun would the children find this?!

I had great success using these Calvin & Hobbes cartoon strips to help teach speech marks within fiction writing this week. Worth looking at for the strips alone! I’m not sure I would be able to use the ‘Garfield Minus Garfield‘ strips, but they are incredibly funny!

Buy

There are two things I have bought on the fabulous eBay recently which I thought I would share here. The first is a motivational sticker set you can get online which would be perfect for school, have a look here. Yes, it’s cheesy, but my own children (as in offspring, not class) love and we regularly talk about them. Thanks @MissJLud for prompting me to mention these.

The other things are personalised stickers, also from eBay. This page is one I’ve used, and the company are very quick. I’ve been using stickers as incentives with my Year 6 Maths set to really good effect. The last set I ordered, I let the class decide the colour, logo, words etc. £2.20 for 96 stickers – bargain! Thanks to @rlj1981 for prompting me with this one!

 

Science

Squishy Circuits is something I had read about last year – but a chance opportunity to teach Science reminded me of the site. It allows you to make a simple play-dough like recipe which can then be used to build circuits with – no crocodile clip hassles etc. Looks great, and may well be something I do during the holidays with my monsters children, but thought it might appeal to others too!

 

Research

I’m a big fan of Hattie, who has carried out some metaresearch into Education to find out what really works under the bonnet. His books aren’t too tricky to grasp, but for a ten minute taster, have a look at this Infographic. Warning – you may be surprised with what his research has found! (via @Pekabelo &@HuntingEnglish)

 

This article from The Guardian is probably more suited to Secondary teachers, but is from a sixteen-year-old complaining that schools are missing an opportunity by not using Facebook and Twitter as VLEs. I don’t necessarily agree with her, but it caused some lively debate online!

 

CPD Saturday

Last Saturday I again abandoned Gemma and the children, and instead headed to Berkhamstead for a Teaching Learning & Assessment Conference. Arriving at 7.45am, I didn’t leave until 4.40pm, and although very tired, was excited and inspired by everything I heard about! You can read my notes about the day here, or ask me and I will forward you what I have. I am definitely going to persuade you to come along next year – it was brilliant, and I hope that the influence it has given me will permeate through the school.

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I came across all of these on Twitter, which is superb for getting and sharing ideas about teaching and learning. More info on joining can be found here. Have a good weekend!

 

Stephen

Eight ways to grow your School Twitter Account

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The Calm After the Show

(Thomas Hawk via Compfight)

If you don’t already have a school Twitter account, I would encourage you to set one up, if only to get the right name! Twitter is enjoying a huge explosion in popularity, and more and more schools are having to adjust their Twitter name because someone has got there first.


Although we have only just started on Twitter, here are eight things I have found to be great for both growing the account (followers) and making it more relevant for the audience.

1. Respond, respond, respond
Don’t just respond to tweets mentioning you, read through your feed and respond professionally if you get a chance!

2. Retweet
Retweet, but not too much or you’ll become a nuisance! If you want to retweet a lot of things, use a service like Buffer, which allows you to send out tweets at timed intervals, to stop the floodgate of 12 tweets in one hour!

3. Follow your locals
This can be local anything, but we have found local media outlets and magazines to be great, very supportive and a brilliant source of fresh local news. They in turn are interested in what you are up to as well! Which can lead to…

4. Getting involved offline
Any good digital relationship leads to an analogue one. Through our school tweets, we have a designer coming to talk to us about their work, been asked to write something for the local magazine and are now providing a Tea Stall for the local Half Marathon! All these lovely contacts were made possible through Twitter.

5. Follow other schools
I cannot emphasise this enough – in fact, my friend @mrwaldram and I set up @basttuk to help with this – it stands for Bring A School To Twitter. It only follows and RTs schools, and has a wealth of ideas to help you out should you want it. Following other schools helps to build relationships and share good ideas together.

6. Share good news
Any good news! School matches, competitions, swimming results, book club, prizes, ANYTHING! I would also advise using hashtags where possible. This not only builds your audience, but it helps people to read your tweets with more focus.

7. Ask questions
If Twitter is brilliant for just one thing, I would have to say it would be for asking open questions. We needed to find a venue for the Barn Dance (our school hall is now too small!) and I asked on Twitter. two hours later I had 12 responses, and several people had retweeted my question – because I had asked them to!

8. Build your school presence out of school
Don’t let your account become dormant over the holidays – keep tweeting. Again, you can use a service like Buffer help you out, but simply asking the pupils what they are up to via Twitter can get a response, and also keeps you in the mind of your followers. I asked pupils to send in pictures of them with snowmen during our snow days in January, and got a lot of responses (as you might imagine). Even more helpfully, it encouraged the parents to become followers on Twitter too!

 

What things have you found useful in growing your School Twitter Audience?

The Joy of #IFTTT or, How I stopped worrying and learned to love productivity

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I sadly can’t remember the one thing I needed to do which made me discover the brilliant IFTTT.com (IfThisThenThat) website, but whatever it is, I am very grateful.

This is an incredibly simple yet cleverly-designed website which allows you to make all the standalone webistes you use for daily life (in my case, Twitter, Dropbox, Facebook, Youtube, Pocket, Email, bitly, Posterous, SMS Texts) and helps you to join them together.

It does this by making what they call recipes. These are simply instructions which follow their branded name, that IF something occurs (which you specify), THEN do something about it.

In a productivity sense, this is fantastic. It automates something you might have done as a matter of course anyway, without any thoughts or hassle. You don’t even have to be near a computer in some cases!

Here is an example. If you see a clip on YouTube you like and Favourite, to shar this with your friends, you might have to find the URL of the clip, copy it, hea over to Facebook, open a status update and paste the clip in.

To do this with IFTTT, simply find a recipe which already does this, or make one up which serves your purpose.

The YouTube clip example is a trivial one which I did essentially to se how simple it would be to do, but I would recommend you explore the ‘browse’ or ‘What’s Hot’ section of IFTTT for ideas and inspiration, and to get an idea of how to build a recipe. Building on yourself is, as I’ve said, very simple indeed. The site talks you through the steps, authenticating each service as you proceed, and leaving you to either run the recipe or turn it off, whichever you choose.

My proudest recipe so far is one assisted by @chilledteaching, where I wanted to build up a text document of Twitter links I had favourited. Other people in my PLN and beyond are now making newsletters, and I thought this would be a good way of auto-curating my favourites. Five minutes later, and IFTTT has a recipe from me which does exactly that. Every time I favourite a tweet, this is added to a text file I have in my Dropbox.

Have a play, and create/share your recipes.

3 New Powerful Twitter Apps

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I have used all three of these Apps in one way or another in the past fortnight, and thought I would review them under one roof!

Summify – A very clever service which examines your follower’s tweets, then ‘curates’ an email summary of the most popular/retweeted posts or blogs. This is fantastic if you are the sort of Twitter user who dips in and out, rather than someone who tends to graze throughout the day. You can set it up to send you a daily email, and since doing this, I have found some real gold in every email.

Buffer – Again, perfect for those who dip into their twitter stream. Rather than swamping your followers with a bunch of responses and RT’s in a ten minute space (which I know I and others are guilty of) and risk annoying others of swamping their stream, this allows you to stack up marked posts or links, and then sends them out on your behalf throughout the day. I emailled the CEO of Buffer with some ideas and he emailled right back, pointing me toward

SocialBro – Based around a chrome Plug-in or the Adobe Air platform, this is an incredibly powerful Twitter Dashboard with some really advanced metrics. It gave me a really good insight into my followers and their habits – the best being that my weekly post reviewing business books was wasted on a Sunday evening for example, as it was one of the least-populated times for my Twitter stream.

All of these Apps are here to give Twitter more value as a tool, and in a way that I haven’t seen before. While to would theoretically be great if Twitter added these kinds of functionality, it might end up bulky and overwhelming. Far better that you can use plug-ins as appropriate.

My take on Twitter Etiquette

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Just a short post, based on me reflecting my increased use of Twitter recently. The following are my unspoken (until now) ‘rules’ that I use to try and ensure I give the type of Twitter experience I’d like to get. I’m not saying these are the best, or right, or even 100% followed by me, but it’s a start!

New Followers
Thank them personally. It’s nice that someone takes an interest.

Look at their blogs/ last few tweets. If there’s something of interest, follow them back.

Tweets
As I use Twitter in a largely professional sense, I tweet as if I were texting a good friend also in Education. I can’t imagine anyone being interested in my breakfast or coffee habits!

I try not to send lots of tweets in bursts, but the way I use Twitter, this sometimes can’t be helped!

If someone tweets or mentions me, I try wherever possible to acknowledge this. It can sometimes feel like you are Tweeting into an abyss, so I try to make others not feel like this. It only takes a few seconds.

Retweets
If I click on a link and find it of interest, I RT. I tend not to follow any ‘please RT’ requests, unless I find them relevant to my PLN.

Celebrities
I don’t follow that many, but those that I do follow are largely interesting and sparing in their tweets. Authors and journalists are superb in responding to tweets.

Listening in
I follow some conversations, and join in when I have something relevant to add or contribute. Sometimes I can be too late to join in, but it is always worth reading back over if there is a hashtag.

Hashtags
I love them! They have finally provided a great alternative to the much-desired ‘sarcastic font’ I have often dreamed of, and they are great for tracking conversations or debates. I try to use them where possible.

Blog promotion
I have set up my blog to tweet a new article, and tend to offer another nudge for new content if I have published it in a quiet time. There are some bloggers who RT new content, or even ‘from the archives..’ tweets, which strikes me as a little bit needy in my book.

Comments
It is always to add a comment if a tweet has led you to an interesting blog. Now’s your chance!

Trips with Twitter

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Is there a way to keep anxious parents informed on a school trip, especially those whose children have never been away from home before, while at the same time allowing the trip leaders to not have yet another thing to do?

We believe there is. For our school trip, we set up a Twitter account. For those who don’t know, Twitter is a service that allows you to update your status whenever you like, using the internet or mobile phone, and produces these text-like ‘tweets’ on a single web page. It does much more than this, such as photo uploading, multiple conversations and geotagging, but these were only lightly used on this trip. Continue reading →