{Technology For Learning}

In this episode of the Technology For Learning Podcast, we just start to scratch the surface of Twitter.  While this podcast may be a little biased because of our love for Twitter, we hope it will be a nice introduction to some of you who may be struggling to figure out how to use Twitter in the classroom.  We review what twitter is, how to get setup, and why you need to setup an account and get involved in the conversation that is going on about your class.

The key to Twitter is to get involved in the conversation.  What you may not realize is that there are students that are talking about your class on Twitter.  If you ignore the conversation you are missing out on an opportunity to move that conversation into positive ground. In addition, Twitter can be used to help build relationships between classmates, offer help at your convenience, and extend learning beyond the classroom.  For students, Twitter is a great way to get help on homework assignments and from the instructor.  A good example of courses using Twitter is COMM313 at BYU-Idaho taught by @brotherjudkins.

We were only able to cover Twitter at a very small level in the short 25 minutes we had on the podcast.  We will definitely be bringing it up again in a future podcast.  Despite that, we feel we can give Twitter a solid GREEN light.  In fact, we firmly believe that if you aren't using Twitter, you are really missing out on a great opportunity to enhance learning in your classes.

You can follow this podcast under the user t4lpodcast.  Please follow today!

Links:

• Tweetie
• DestroyToday
• Digsby (Windows Twitter/IM Client)

In our inaugural episode of the Technology for Learning podcast, we talk about why we are doing this podcast. We believe that technology can really help the learning experience in our schools and so we've set out to help individuals that want to implement technology but are struggling to do so.

We start off talking about our new website and some of the features that we want to build into it.  Some of those features include a database of all the software that we've reviewed both on and off the podcast.  Each technology we review gets rated on a scale of Red, Yellow, and Green.  You can see our reviews here: http://technologyforlearning.info/the-technologies/

The first technology we reviewed was Google Sidewiki.  Sidewiki comes as part of the latest Google toolbar for Firefox web browsers. We talk about some use cases for the classroom and discuss in depth its features.  The score we gave Sidewiki is a solid YELLOW. We think Sidewiki has great potential but it's big limitation is how the information can be aggregated to easily see who wrote what and where.

This is our first podcast and it is really rough so we hope you will be patient with us while we work out the kinks.

Enjoy the podcast!