Delicious Twittering

Ok – it’s been a while since I posted on here but I thought it would be fun to mention a couple of things that I am looking into at the moment.  Hopefully at some point in the near future I will stop just looking into things and actually start using some of the great web 2.0 stuff that is around.  I still struggle to work out how to actually use the resources that are out there.  By that I mean I know how to use them in terms of logging in and posting messages and the actual technical side of the stuff but I don’t know how to use them in my classroom.

I guess that’s where the gift is.  It’s what I’m striving for.  When I’ve found it I will let you know.  But until then I will just keep telling you about stuff I find.  Neither of the following things are new but I’d like to mention them.

The first is Delicious.  Not the food magazine that my wife subscribes to but a social bookmarking site that is really taking off (and has, indeed, been taking off for a while).  I have setup an account for my school but not put too many links on there yet.  It’s a great way of keeping all your much liked and useful links in one place you can access from anywhere with an interweb connection.  It’s free too which makes it even better!  There’s a lot more to it – such as tags, bundles and networks but I’m not going in to that.

The second thing I’d like to mention is something I use on my personal blog and have started using a little bit in my classroom but not in a ‘real’ way.  It’s Twitter.  Twitter is:

a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Basically it’s a status update tool – you get 160 characters (or something like that) to say what you are up to. Like a mini blog. You can send messages to it via email, your blog, your mobile, a downloaded desktop tool or even the website itself. I don’t think you can send messages via post yet though. I like it. I’ve started using it a bit as a plenary tool at school – at the end of each session, after I have done the main plenary I will ask the kids to compose a very brief summary of what we have been learning (basically comes out like our WALT). Through Twitter you can follow people’s updates and see what they are up to.  At the moment the kids don’t have anything to do with the Twitter page itself – I add that after the lesson – but it is useful for quick updates of the website and blogs etc and a good review tool for my class.  I can see it being used as an instant publishing tool further up the school – so as soon as children find something out they can publish it to twitter or even ask questions of people who ‘follow’ them.  Tom Barrett talked at length about Twitter and using it in the classroom over on his edublog.