Teachers' Technical Toolkit
Twitter is used as a means for students to note-take, note-share and draw others into the conversations.
- Set up a Twitter account
- Understand what hashtags do
- How to search on a hashtag in Twitter and TweetDeck
- How to save a search-column on a hashtag (in TweetDeck)
- This is super useful keeping track of conversations between sessions.
Storify
Storify is an aggregation tool to curate the notes.
- Set up a Storify account
- Understand how to load hashtag and curate tweets
- How to pull in other content
- How to add comments into the Story
Website/Blogging space for the Class
I highly recommend using Reclaim Hosting to host your class and WordPress to power your website, especially if you're new to this - Jim and Tim are fellow open teachers and have been brilliant helping me to get set-up (I'm rubbish at web-tech stuff).
Use the offer code cclasses to receive a 20% discount off their faculty plan.
Creating Session Content
Aim for session content to be around 20mins and as this experiment deals with three sessions, you'll need three chunks.
- Your content could be something (like a lecture) you pre-record or perhaps an interview or conversation
- For video conferencing interviews, Google Hangouts on Air will record and directly upload to YouTube, or I use Call Recorder for Skype.
- For sound recordings you can use QuickTime or your mobile phone and upload to SoundCloud or Archive.org
- You could also source other content such as relevant TV or Radio programmes for example.
Students' Technical Toolkit
We will be using Twitter as a means to take and share notes with each other and to draw other people outside the class into the conversations.
- Set up a Twitter account
- If you are not aware, here is what hashtags do
- You can search a hashtag in the search bar on Twitter.com or you can search by clicking on the hashtag embedded in a posted tweet. Here is some helpful guidance to read if you're stuck.
- You can also save a search-column on a hashtag (in TweetDeck)
- This is super useful keeping track of conversations between sessions.
Storify
Your lecturer will do this in class, but if you want to make your own class notes that are tailored to your interests, you can use Storify.
- Set up a Storify account
- Understand how to load hashtags and curate tweets
- How to pull in other content
- This is great for bringing in your own research.
- How to add comments into the Story
- You can add your reflections and conclusions using this feature, if you want.
n.b. Socioviz.net (allows the user to visualise interactions for free and is a potential starting point from which to move on to Martin Hawksey’s TAGS Explorer) - thanks @Digisim .
Blogging space for your reflections
If your lecturer has secured hosting with Reclaim Hosting, that is awesome. But if not, there are a whole host of different spaces where you can write your reflections. You could add your Storify notes into this too.
Be sure to check you are happy with the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policies. Here is a list of platforms you might use:
Once you have your Blog URL and Twitter ID, please send them to your lecturer before the classes begin.
