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Twitter is Messy

Seems that Twitter is starting to gain some traction with new people lately… after an interesting couple of posts on the OzTeachers list, I thought I’d throw in some tips and suggestions that have become more obvious to me now I’ve been using it for a while…

Here’s a snip from the email I sent back to the list…  take from it what you will.  Arguments welcome in the comments.  🙂

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I can understand the sceptics about Twitter… I was one for a long time. However, I’ve also been getting incredible personal and professional value out of Twitter for quite a while now… So here’s a few thoughts that might help you get your head around it…

You might like to start with my original explanation of Twitter.

The first advice is this…
Don’t even think about evaluating the worth of Twitter until you are “following” at least 40-50 people. Twitter works because it invites diversity and traffic. If you only follow a few people, you’ll get neither and hence won’t really be able to judge whether it has any value for you or not. So find someone you think is worth following, look at who they follow, add some people from their follow list and so on. Don’t stop until you are following at least 40-50 people. Yes, this will generate traffic. Yes you will not be able to take it all in (well, maybe at 40 you still can, but not much beyond that) That’s ok… you don’t need to read every tweet. As you add people to your follow list, you gradually get to a point where the messages flow by you much faster than you can deal with. That’s ok too… it’s a smorgasbord, you don’t need to eat everything! But seriously, if you try to “manage” Twitter by only following a few people you will never see the worth of it. Trust me on this.

Second bit of advice…

Choose who you follow carefully… take a look at their bio, see what they do. I tend to avoid the “web entrepreneurs”, “marketing gurus”, “social media analysts” and so on… they tend to waffle about things I’m not interested in. I usually look for people who are educators, although I do add the occasional non-educator in order to keep some degree of diversity in the feed. Too many people with all the same outlook on things tends to create an echo chamber where there is no diverse opinions or ideas. So it’s good to have a few “ring ins”, just to mix things up a bit. Once you find someone to follow, look at the type and frequency of messages… you probably don’t want to follow someone who constantly tell you what they just had for breakfast or that they are getting their hair done, and you probably don’t want to follow someone who tweets every 3 minutes. However, again, a little bit of diversity can be a good thing, and you’d be surprised at how often these seemingly trivial messages can help you, and to help put a human side to these people you follow. You decide what works for you…

Third bit of advice…

Remember that your tweets go to everyone who follows you, and that they become part of the public record. I wouldn’t, for example, tweet about my bad day and how much I hate my job. I wouldn’t whine too much, swear too much, or do things that would generally have a negative impact on my “digital footprint”. It also means that if you have followers from different parts of your life, they will all get the same tweets… so your family (if they follow you) will read your tweets about education, and your educator colleagues will get to read your tweets about that family bbq last weekend. This is not a problem, but you do need to think about how you structure your online social world.

Learn to use the @ reply system and to send d direct messages to people. Take some time to work out the Twitter culture… like all online communities, it most certainly has one. And if you find a conversation starting to evolve in Twitter between yourself and someone else, and you are realising that it probably isn’t of real interest to the general Twitter community, take it to another forum to keep it going… Skype is great for this.

Last bit of advice…
Get a Twitter client! If you need to go back to the Twitter homepage all the time to check what’s happening, you will quickly lose interest. So pick a good client Twitter app that will run in the background. I used to like Twitterific, but Twhirl is my current favourite. Tweetdeck is pretty good too, though probably better once you get the hang of Twitter. There are plenty of Twitter tools for mobile devices too, like Twinkle, Tweetie and Twibble. Trying to take Twitter seriously without one of these tools is just making life hard for yourself. Get one.

Finally, remember that Twitter is about “small pieces loosely joined”, which is really how the world works in real life. In real life, it is the tiny, seemingly insignificant social connections that so often direct our lives in some surprisingly major ways. Some of you have jobs that you work in because your mother’s friend’s daughter knew a guy whose dentist sent her son to a school that was thinking about employing an extra teacher, and because of these loosely joined social connections, you ended up with a job. Perhaps you met your husband because you went for a drink with a friend one night and bumped into a person who knew someone you went to school with and his best mate had a brother that you were introduced to and eventually married. Isn’t this really how life works? You know it is! Think about your life, and identify all the little serendipitous things that happened to you because you just happened to be in the right place at the right time, talking to the right person. The more connections you make, the more likelihood you have of these “small pieces loosely joined” actually leading you into things that you never knew you wanted and that you never, ever could have predicted. That’s what Twitter does.

Still a sceptic? Trust me and just try it. Not by following three people and never looking at it again, but by REALLY trying it, addinglots of people to your network, and for at least 6 months. Then meet me back here in 6 months and tell me some of the amazing stories that happened to you because of Twitter.

CC BY-SA-NC Image by Nimages DR

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Get Inspired

The successor to Promethean’s ActivStudio 3 software is known as the ActivSoftware Inspire Edition… although hopefully it will just be called ActivInspire or something less wordy.  The first Beta release of Inspire is now available and Promethean is encouraging people to download, install and play with it, no doubt to try and identify as many bugs as possible before the production release, due in late March.

While I was writing the IWB book, I was fortunate to have been invited to a sneak peek at a very early Alpha build of this software, and it’s certainly come a long way since the buggy, crash-prone demo I saw a few months ago.  For a Beta, this is actually quite stable, although there are still some unusual behaviours and unexpected interface issues to iron out in the next two months.

To give you a bit of an insight into some of the most obvious new features, both good and not so good, I’ve recorded this screencast about the new Inspire edition.  It’s about 20 minutes long, but if you use Promethean software I hope you’ll find it useful in helping you get your head around the changes.  And there are some major changes too… the team behind Inspire were aware that ActivStudio had a number of legacy issues that needed to be addresses, so they decided to start with a clean slate and develop the new version from scratch.  This is not an update on ActivStudio, this is a whole new codebase and a complete rethink of how an IWB interface should work.  The interface is certainly cleaner, and there seems to be less clicking to get things done.  It’s still not perfect, especially in the area of video handling, but it does seem to be a step in the right direction.  It appears to borrow some interface ideas from other tools like PowerPoint and Smart Notebook, but reinterprets them.  My first impression is that, although it is certainly a big improvement on AS3, it still needs quite a bit of work before the final release.

You can get your own copy of the new beta from the Promethean Planet website.  You need to be a Planet member, but it’s free to join.

In a nutshell, some of the new features worthy of a mention are…

  • Profiles for task-centric tool palettes
  • Browser pane for easier access to common functions
  • Cleaner, more streamlined interface
  • Support for multitouch and dual pens
  • Elimination of the familiar edit panels that appear when you double click an object
  • Non-modal action pbjects
  • New connector tools
  • More familiar use of a standard menu bar at the top of the screen
  • Better drawing tools
  • ActivStudio and ActivPrimary both optionally available within the same application
  • Customisable tooltips on objects
  • Better 4:3 Flipchart support for widescreen computers
  • Much better implementation of templates

It’s not all rosy however… there are still some notable ommisions, such as the ommision of a tool for creating tables, something their competitor Smart Notebook 10 actually does very well.  Tables really need to be in here.

The other notable point is the lousy way it seems to handle video and media.  This has been my biggest complaint about ActivStudio 3, it just does a really crappy job of managing digital video.  It needs to be far less fussy about what media type you throw at it, it needs to render video really well, and it needs to allow the embedding of video into the page rather than just creating links to it to open in a new window.  Although Inspire has attempted to improve this aspect of the software, it still has an awfully long way to go in my opinion.

There is plenty to talk about in this Beta release, and I think I might make a couple of other video reviews in the next couple of weeks.  But take a look for yourself… in the interests of making sure the final release candidate is everything it should be, I’d encourage you to download it, cast a critical eye over it and tell Promethean what you think.

I’ve been pretty critical of ActivStudio 3 in the past, and have complained loudly about its woeful usability and lack of standardised interface design.  I have even been whinging directly to Promethean over the last six months or so, and I’m pleased to see that this new version seems to be the start of finally getting it right.

Not bad so far, but Just fix the damn video handling issues!

PS… I meant to mention these couple of extra things, but forgot…  so here is another screencast just to add the bits I missed.

A couple more things about Activ Inspire from Chris Betcher on Vimeo.

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Teacher TV… who knew?

The things you discover by accident…

I was sitting at home watching late night TV tonight and there wasn’t much on that I thought was interesting, so I started flipping channels.  We don’t have cable or satellite, just free-to-air TV, and to be honest I usually just stick to the handful of “standard” channels – 7, 9, 10, ABC and SBS.  Since we got a digital TV, it’s been nice to get the High Def versions of these channels, but the other thing about free-to-air digital is that it also gives you a whole lot more free channels outside the standard ones.

Flipping through, I discovered a new channel I’d never seen before – Teacher TV.  It had an interview with an Australian teacher talking about literacy strategies and how to give kids opportunities to express themselves in other ways than just traditional writing activities.  She was talking about how important it was to offer ways to create and express, not just pass tests.  This got my attention…  I had no idea that there was a fulltime 24-hour-a-day channel dedicated to issues around education.

As I’ve been writing this, there has been a story about some strategies for dealing with homophobia in schools, including strategies, activities and suggestions.  Right now there is an interview with a teacher in Perth talking about an effective writing activity for Year 1 students.  Not exactly mainstream TV, but interesting to me.

It turns out there is also a website to support the channel, and you can find it at www.teacherstv.com.au.  Who knew?

Reading through the About section on the website, it turns out that there has been a Teacher TV channel in the UK for a while now, and the Australian one is based on the UK one.  In fact, during this first roll-out phase, some of the content has been repurposed from the UK version, but it will eventually be replaced with more and more Australian content.  There is quite a bit of Australian content there already however… a quick browse through the rather significant collection of video content on the website reveals, among other things, stories about a Year 10 English teacher at Canberra Grammar School using wikis to study Macbeth, a story about teaching in remote schools by a PE teacher working on Thursday Island, a look at the Wiradjuri aboriginal language program at Forbes North Public School, and – in a complete surprise to me –  a story about the art gallery and the artist-in-residence program at Presbyterian Ladies College Sydney, the school at which I currently teach!

The website says “Teachers TV content often features great teachers and teaching in action. Stories are focused on classroom and school observation to illustrate how different teachers deal with challenges, ideas, problems, innovation and systems.” What a great idea! … 24/7 teacher PD on TV!

Check it out, and if you like what you see, spread the word about it as they say they are still trialling the service.  No doubt they would like to know that people watch the channel, so tell people about it and let the channel know you’re aware of it.  Hopefully it will continue.

Teachers TV is available on Channel 47 on Broadcast Australia’s digital free-to-air television trial platform known as DIGITAL FORTY FOUR and can be received by any household who currently receives digital terrestrial Television signals (via a Digital TV or a set top box). Take a look…  it’s not bad!