ISTE Connects - Educational Technology » collaborate http://www.isteconnects.org Celebrating 30 Years of Ed Tech Vision Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:33:45 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 en hourly 1 Converse on the NECC Ning! http://www.isteconnects.org/2009/06/08/converse-on-the-necc-ning/ http://www.isteconnects.org/2009/06/08/converse-on-the-necc-ning/#comments Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:20:25 +0000 Wes Fryer http://www.isteconnects.org/?p=5746 Building on the successes of last year, ISTE is again using a Ning social networking website to encourage NECC 2009 attendees to collaborate, network, dialog, and connect before, during and after the conference. Instead of naming the network for a specific conference year, however, the Ning is now titled “NECC Ning” and is accessible from www.neccning.org. Last year’s NECC Ning address (www.necc2008.org) also remains functional, but the new address is the one you’ll be seeing advertised at the conference and by ISTE in other venues.

If you are a NECC 2009 presenter, be sure to check out the NECC Speaker Instructions from Anita McAnear which she shared on June 4th. These instructions explain how each lead presenter should create a new discussion forum post on the Ning, and then copy/paste that link into the NECC Presenter Menu website. I followed these steps to create a forum post for the session on “The Power of Our Family Learning Blog” that I’m co-presenting with my children, and the entire process took about ten minutes.


Visit NECC Ning

I think ISTE is right on target in modeling how a Ning site can be used to extend conversations and learning before, during and after a conference.

If you use an aggregator or feed reader like Google Reader, remember you can subscribe to RSS feeds from the NECC Ning to stay up to date on conversations taking place there. After clicking the FORUM link on the NECC Ning, look for the feed/RSS icon in the lower left corner.

neccning-rss

Copy and paste that address into your aggregator and you’ll be able to readily monitor the pulse of conversations on the NECC Ning from the comfort of your own feed reader!

]]> http://www.isteconnects.org/2009/06/08/converse-on-the-necc-ning/feed/ 0 Archiving Twitter Nuggets http://www.isteconnects.org/2009/05/06/archiving-twitter-nuggets/ http://www.isteconnects.org/2009/05/06/archiving-twitter-nuggets/#comments Wed, 06 May 2009 06:32:20 +0000 Wes Fryer http://www.isteconnects.org/?p=4412 Twitter can provide an amazing quantity of great ideas and links on a daily basis, if you follow people and organizations who/which both:

  1. Share your interests.
  2. Use Twitter to share links.

twitter

With so many outstanding ideas and links being shared daily, it is important to consider how these resources can be efficiently saved for future use.

To date, my primary ways of saving Twitter resources shared by others for later reference have been:

  1. “Favoriting” the tweet by clicking the empty star by the tweet either on the website or in my favorite iPhone Twitter application, Twitterfon.
  2. Retweeting the tweet so I can both share it with others and find it later in my own Twitter stream/feed.
  3. Clicking the shared link and then using my social bookmarks (Diigo which cross-posts to Delicious) to save and tag the website for later use.

This evening I read that the Evernote web service has been updated to permit Twitter users to dynamically save Tweets to Evernote. After you follow EverNote’s MyEn account on Twitter and click the link EverNote sends as a direct twitter message, you can link up your EverNote and Twitter account by logging into the EverNote website. With that setup complete, simply include “@myen” in a Tweet to save it to EverNote. This is a new and innovative way to archive good ideas as well as links from Twitter friends.

How are you saving and sharing “good finds” from Twitter?

]]> http://www.isteconnects.org/2009/05/06/archiving-twitter-nuggets/feed/ 2 Demonstrate the Power of a Personal Learning Network: Help Send a Newbie to NECC http://www.isteconnects.org/2009/04/19/demonstrate-the-power-of-a-personal-learning-network-help-send-a-newbie-to-necc/ http://www.isteconnects.org/2009/04/19/demonstrate-the-power-of-a-personal-learning-network-help-send-a-newbie-to-necc/#comments Sun, 19 Apr 2009 22:27:07 +0000 Beth Still http://www.isteconnects.org/?p=3225 It seems like not a day goes by without hearing at least one story about Twitter on the news. The original intent behind Twitter was to help people keep their friends and family informed about what they were doing. Educators have taken Twitter to an entirely new level. We have started using this microblog for a variety of projects. Like many teachers, I was apprehensive about the value of Twitter. It took a lot of time and dedication to build a solid group of people to follow, but now that my personal learning network (PLN) is firmly established, I am learning more than I ever thought possible. In addition to learning about more tools than I will ever be able to use in lifetime, Twitter has provided me with the opportunity to connect with educators who share my passion for teaching. I no longer feel isolated in my classroom in Nebraska. I have people from all over the world that I can learn from on a daily basis. Twitter also helps educators overcome the perceived barriers between “regular” educators and the leaders in education who have a great deal of influence in the Twitterverse.

I am on a mission to raise awareness about the benefits of using tools such as Twitter to establish PLN’s. I recently began an experiment to see if Twitter could be used by educators to collaborate across time and space to reach a common goal. I decided to start a project called Send a Newbie to NECC. I picked one person from my PLN whom had never attended NECC, but whom I believed would benefit immensely from the experience. I wrote a blog post asking people from my PLN to show their support for Twitter and their PLN by donating to a fund to help send Richard Byrne (@rmbyrne on Twitter) to the National Educational Computing Conference .

I selected Richard because he has been such an integral part of my PLN. He takes the time to share valuable educational resources on a daily basis – often several times a day – ultimately saving busy educators valuable time. Richard’s blog recently won the Edublog’s Top Resource Sharing Blog for 2008. With 1600 followers on Twitter and 5000 people subscribing to his blog I think it is safe to say that he is an important part of many PLN’s.

The intent behind this project is to raise awareness about the positive side of social networking. Twitter, like other social networks, is not the problem – it is how people use it. It is difficult for some educators to see the benefits of networking with a group of strangers. Educators need to see examples of how Twitter can be of use to them before they will embrace it. Many fear networking because sites like MySpace and Facebook have received so much bad press recently. I am trying to make a difference by rallying my PLN to support this worthwhile cause. The success of this project rests in the hands of the people in my learning network. I am not only relying on them for monetary donations, but I also need them to help promote this project and gain more support from the people in their network. I hope you will consider participating in this unique project.

]]> http://www.isteconnects.org/2009/04/19/demonstrate-the-power-of-a-personal-learning-network-help-send-a-newbie-to-necc/feed/ 64