Twitter to the rescue
It was a day like all other days …
… actually it was Friday – day #3 of the 2010 school year. According to my planner Friday is ePortfolio posting day – and yesterday was my students (8 & 9 year olds) first introduction to their Edublogs ePortfolios.
The first few went ok – they had cheat sheets to refer to if they forgot what to do and their login/password information was on a laminated card for them. I had 5 students working at a time on the computers. (Although I could have had 13 working at the same time I wanted a smaller number in case I had to problem solve.)
The problems started when the second person onto the computer went to log in – instead of arriving at their own dashboard they arrived at the previous person’s dashboard. I switched them to a different browser and that worked ok for the first person but the same problem occurred in the second browser.
Oh No!
Then one of my students published his post and got a pop-up message about it being spam.
More Oh NO!
I quickly wrote a message in the box on the page explaining that this was an 8 year old making his very first post, submitted it and went to my laptop.
Here’s where Twitter comes in. I knew that Sue Waters – Edublog guru and Aussie superhero was on Twitter – we’ve chatted on and off over the past few years. I sent two Tweets out to her explaining the problems.
Within 30 minutes she’d responded with a solution for the first and fixed the second problem and even sent a message to my students explaining antisplog in kidspeak to them.
Without the ready access to Twitter and people/experts this problem would have taken quite some time to fix. One of the good things with Twitter is that I can have DM (direct messages) sent to my cell phone so I had a sound alert that she’d responded to my call for help.
A huge thanks to Sue for her help.
As an aside – my tweeted messages and the responses weren’t private/hidden from my students – they saw me send the tweet and they saw the responses. It’s things like this that show them responsible use of Twitter.
Filed under: Twitter
Always happy to help and really sorry about the blog being spammed
I use that explanation to explain how anti-splog works to others also. I hope they had a chuckle at how I explained it.
Read this post if you want to know more about it and why we need to use it – http://wpmu.org/how-anti-splog-is-saving-edublogs/
Ms. Dragonsinger,
I am a student from Dr. Strange’s edm310 class and have come to your page for an assignment. I will be summarizing your posts, along with two other teachers, on my blog, which can be found at locklinrachael.blogspot.com on or before March 21. The class blog itself can be found at edm310.blogspot.com.
I found your post to be very inspiring. As teachers, I feel that we should make the most use out of technology to better educate our students. Twitter used to be of no interest to me, but I have recently begun seeing it’s value. Thank you for your wonderful post!