Yesterday we held our third TechTalk of the year. TechTalk is a monthly show focused on digital texts and tools that might matter in classrooms, from Pre-K through higher education. The goal is not hype. It is to offer an approachable overview of the affordances, opportunities, and challenges of a tool or platform.
This episode focused on Twitter, Vine, and Instagram as tools for creating, sharing, and connecting in open online spaces. We also looked at TweetDeck and Hootsuite as ways to follow conversation, manage participation, and make sense of what is happening in networked publics.
What motivated me the most from yesterday’s show was the guidance and urging of Molly Shields to really push my expectations of my students…but probably more importantly my expectations of what I should be creating and sharing online. I’ve toyed with digital and multimodal storytelling in fits and drabs over the years…but perhaps I should make it a more concerted effort. As an aside …I’m feeling a need to focus this year on my online digital presence. That means spending time and money looking at “best principles” for video, audio, and web design. This is also motivated by the fact that the video for this episode is horrendous. 🙂
Nevertheless, I hope you take a chance to review the materials for this episode. I also suggest reading Molly’s blog…if you don’t have it added to your repertoire already. For some more Twitter support, please review the materials on “Why Twitter in Education” that Verena Roberts is pulling together. I already added some new tools to my repertoire. Finally, please be sure to review some of the earlier TechTalks of the year…at least the ones that we started doing completely on Google Hangouts.