Social Media Archives

Are your thoughts tweet worthy?

March 23, 2014 by Amber 5 Comments

I will always remember the first conversation I had with a professional colleague about Twitter. I’d attended BLC and been swept away in a Twitter tidal wave by Liz Davis and Lisa Thumann. (This also, coincidentally enough, was where the @8amber8 moniker came from…who knew this tool would become my go to PD reference and I’d have to explain that bad boy all the time!)

It came up in conversation that no one wanted to know what I’d had for lunch that day, that Twitter was pointless. This thought has now gone by the way side, 🙂 and there are 243 million monthly active users. While some may still talk about their lunch, it has become a place to share and be shared with. Twitter is an outstanding communication tool for three main reasons:

Twitter enables you to release brief, 140 character, gems of greatness to the world.
Twitter encourages conversations outside of your silo.
Twitter is word of mouth “genius sharing”. Great ideas get shared, and seen, and built upon.

Are you worried you don’t have anything to say? Wonder if your ideas are tweet worthy?

Here are 5 things you can tweet about….

1. Edu Wins: Share the good things happening on your campus. Break down the walls of and allow others to see what is happening. Tell your story. There are GREAT things happening every day in our schools, we should want to invite everyone to know how amazing our students and teachers are. An elephant can be eaten, one bite at a time, and some of our tweets may be those bites that show others just what we do.

2. Great ideas: My favorite event we’ve done this year has been “Tacos & Technology”, an idea I learned about from Sam LeDeaux, a principal in Chicago. While I love both tacos & technology, I’d never thought about putting them together for a parent night until he shared what is campus had done.

3. Support: A PLN becomes your educational support system. Need to ask a question and not feel judged? Need affirmation that what you are thinking or doing is what’s best for kids? There are people there to support you…and vice versa. Support others!

4. Questions: If you’ve ever read a thought-provoking article and wanted to discuss it with someone, here’s your chance. Tweet the link and start a conversation. Wonder how to make genius hour work? This space allows you have dialogue with other educators, other practitioners, who have tried it. Learn from them!

5. Who are you? George Couros has written about the difficulty in keeping your personal and professional life separate. Educators are persuaders. So much of our professional life is inspired by the personal connections we have. It’s impossible to keep those separate and yet simultaneously woven into the relationships we develop. You can’t know my heart if you don’t know a little of whats inside of it.

4 things that you shouldn’t ever tweet about, 🙂

1. Negativity: There are enough negative people in the world. We don’t need anymore like that. Any donkey can knock down a building, but it takes a special donkey to build one up.

2. Rants: Same as above. Ranting and raving will not solve anything. This isn’t that kind of space, and it undermines our goals in education: to lift up, inspire, and to teach.

3. Profane or inappropriate thoughts, images, jokes: The best (and safest) social media advice I’ve ever been given came from our communications coordinator. If it isn’t something you’d be ok with on the headline of the newspaper or happening in your school lobby, don’t post it. He didn’t say don’t DO IT, he said don’t post it, anywhere. There’s enough that can happen in life that we don’t, as an educational system, need to be sharing publicly things that could damage our professional image or efficacy. That’s a lesson to learn the hard way. Just ask her, her, or her... (Three cases have gone to the Supreme Court involving educators and free speech, and all three lost, by the way.)

4. Remember your purpose! If you’re on Twitter to learn, to share, and to grow professionally, as defined by your intent and bio, then do that.

What of your reasons have I missed? Not jumped into the Twitterverse? What’s holding you back?

Tweetly,

Amber

Have a book study via Twitter? Yes we did!

March 5, 2014 by Amber 1 Comment

Time is a hot commodity for anyone, but especially for teachers at the beginning of the year. Knowing this when it came time for our staff development plans, the idea of book study made us yawn. How can you spice up a book study, engage your staff in a digital environment, and promote a digital presence?

You have a book study chat on Twitter!

We started by choosing a book we knew would have an immediate impact on classrooms, “Teach Like a Pirate”. It set the tone for the whole inservice, and we were able to go with a “pirate” theme. (I love a good theme!) Teachers were given their books with an intro the first day we came back. We divided the book into 4 parts, gave the dates that each part was to be completed by. So as not to overwhelm, because this was a lot of teachers first foray into Twitter, we decided there would be just three questions for each part. I gave a very basic session on the in’s and out’s of Twitter. We created our accounts and wrote our bios, making sure they represented our educationally interest. We talked about hashtags, chats, and the purpose of this “global” learning space.

The book study questions were to be answered via twitter, using the hashtag #WTLAP. (Watson Teach Like a Pirate)

We used a Q1, A1 format to answer on the date given for each set of questions. The official #WTLAP chat was from 8-8:30pm, but they had 24 hours to respond to the questions before I “storified” the results.
This allowed everyone to scroll back through the tweets.

http://storify.com/amberteamann/wtlap-book-study-chat-9-9-2013.html

What did this accomplish?

It created a presence on Twitter for our staff, which helped lead to the next step of creating our #WMST hashtag, to start to document our #eduwins for all of our stakeholders.
The awareness of others to follow, based on the conversations happening, built a base for many teachers to create their own PLN.
It allowed other educational connections to be formed. We had several educators from around the world join in our chat which removed the “walls” from around our building.
Teachers were able to think and creatively share their responses for an audience of more than just our staff, including author, Dave Burgess who joined us our first night.
We were able to spend time in our campus based learning meetings focused on other instructional matters, since this was all done on their own time.
Teachers who needed support were able to ask and recieve help privately, on their own ability level. This was an incredible opportunity to offer my help and really get to know our teachers.

Here’s our handout, #WTLAP.

Special thanks to Chris Kesler, who lent me his official TLAP chat questions that we were able to modify for our staff.

chattingly,

Amber

Make an intentional DIGITAL difference!

January 28, 2014 by Amber 2 Comments

Digital Learning Day is about giving every child the opportunity to learn in a robust digital environment everyday, with the goal of success in college and a career. On Wednesday, February 5, tens of thousands of teachers and millions of students across the country will participate in the third annual Digital Learning Day—a national celebration of innovative teaching and common-sense, effective applications of digital learning in America’s schools that support teachers, improve learning, and help students achieve at their highest potential. We here at Watson MST have a higher cause to celebrate this day, this is the style of learning we are leading our MST charge with. To make this day stand out, I am offering different ways that you can add some digital spice to your classroom. I’ve attached a digital challenge bucket list…if you can complete 5 of these activities through the month of February, I’ll either do a week of your duty or teach your class for three hours. Your choice! Now, 5 out of the list…that will require some extra effort on your part, but I think you can do it! Set a personal goal..can’t handle 5? Do one, do two…just make a digital difference, intentionally, this month! Day 1, I gave ya yesterday via email:

Virtual Valentines

The K-12 Virtual Valentines Project designed to teach students geographical awareness and cultural understanding while connecting classrooms all around the world for Valentine’s Day. Our goal is to circumnavigate the globe with virtual Valentines. Whether your students are in kindergarten or are seniors in high school, this project will help them learn something new. This project is being organized by the EdTech Chat ‘n Chew Podcast Team. Our mission is to help you empower your students through 21st Century learning. Throughout the year we’ll be sharing opportunities for your students to learn by connecting with others around the world. Feel free to use the twitter hashtag: #k12valentines Day 2: Have a conversation about DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP and what it means to be active learners in a world full of other people’s creativity. Start conversations about what it means to be a digital citizen from this poster, print it out, and hang it outside of your classroom.

Here is the bucket list….game on! Amber

Tacos & Technology: a parent tech night!

December 17, 2013 by Amber Leave a Comment

Tonight is our tacos and technology night! We’re inviting parents in to hear where we are going as a campus using Twitter and to help them understand/get involved in our conversation!

My initial invite for Technology & Tacos spelled out the “who” should come, modeled after Sam LeDeaux, up in Chicago, who was so helpful while I was planning this event.

We also mentioned it EVERY day until the event. A local mexican restaurant gave us a great deal on tacos (!!!) and we will be providing devices for those who don’t have one to bring. I have staff and an amazing number of parents helping facilitate as well as watching lil’wildcats that come with their parents.

I’ll be distributing this click sheet for them to take home Signing Up for Twitter (spanish: Cómo empezar en Twitter) and talking through this presentation, Final T&T tech night.

This site will also be able to be accessed through this QR code. 🙂 I plan on streaming this event and will link that broadcast back to this site as well, for those parents who are unable to make it.

taco twitterN,

Amber

A power point Christmas? No thank you…an alternative!

December 11, 2013 by Amber 2 Comments

I am in charge of our campus Christmnas card each year. I consider it my badge of honor (albeit, a badge made up in my head) that I’ve not done the same style of card in 4 years. (It’s the little things.)

When I started thinking about something for this year, I remembered a tool that I had heard of from my favorite lil’ol podcast, Techlandia.

Jon, Curt, & Allison had talked about VideoScribe HD a few weeks ago and it was the perfect solution! The app was less than $5, even when I paid a little bit more to get the branding removed when it was rendered.

The result? A unique greeting that looks like it took me forever…but didn’t.

Clever, eh? Also appreciate @ipadsammy being at my beck and literal, call! 🙂 This is an easy tool that turns any presentation into something fancy…and we all know power point is very 1997. (**quote from Grey’s Anatomy**)

If you don’t listen to Techlandia, I highly suggest you do so, it genuinely provides me so many resources that benefit me, my campus, and ultimately, our students.

Jingle bellN,

Amber