photo credit: fifikins

A couple of months ago I decided to expand my use of Twitter, and began following more and more people in the education community. This was awesome, until I realized I could not keep up with the barrage of data that I was being given. In November I started brainstorming ideas on how to keep up. I noticed in any of my twitter clients that they were not grabbing all the tweets that had been posted from the last time I checked. The reason being is the API only gives you the last 200 tweets, and for me that was about 40 minutes worth.

My first course of action was to write some software that would grab the tweets from my @mr_rcollins timeline, parse the info and store it in a MySQL database. Besides pulling out the data I was interested in of each tweet, I also stored the complete tweet. This became impractical, since in a month the complete tweets themselves occupied 4.2GB! I stopped storing the complete tweets which left me with a 20MB database after a 5 weeks of collecting, which was a lot more manageable.

The next step was to start parsing the tweet’s text for urls, resolve any shortened urls, and dump them into another table for me to peruse. While I got that software working, I came across ReadTwit.com. This is a great service that will take your timeline, parse out the urls, resolve shortened links, and give you a RSS feed that you can subscribe to in your favorite RSS reader (I use Google Reader. Now I just go through Reader like normal, and am able to tag/star important sites that are posted to my Twitter timeline.

photo credit: davidsilver

This article started out as the top ten skills needed to use technology effectively, but as I wrote the list, I realized that technology shouldn’t be separated out. As we proclaim that technology is a tool, we also shouldn’t single it out when talking about what skills it takes to educate. The following list has a few items that are somewhat related to technology, the others are what I view as important skills any teacher needs to have if they want to succeed. Successful teachers will not find any surprises in this list.

1. mastery of your subject – If you don’t know your subject, your students will learn that rather quickly. You must know what you’re teaching, backwards and forwards. There are no shortcuts here. If you cannot answer a student’s question, use your searching skills to find the answer as quickly as possible.

2. classroom management – Whether it’s your morning math meeting or working in small groups, you will not have a successful class if you cannot manage it.

3. Your students don’t know as much as you think they do, and you know more then they think you do – There are a few phrases that have gained some popularity in the past couple of years that I disagree with. The impression that teachers are digital immigrants and students are digital natives is an incorrect assumption. Most students do not know as much as their teachers when it comes to using technology. And teachers do know more about technology then they realize. The personal computer is over 30 years old, for a majority of teachers this is longer then their teaching career. They’ve seen how technology has changed some classrooms, and can leverage that experience in their own classroom.

4. Ability to punt – Your day to day classroom will probably never work exactly as you pictured it in your mind, and your ability to punt and do something different is imperative. Supplies for a science experiment hasn’t arrived? Prepare to punt. Internet access down? Punt!

5. Keeping an open mind – “Those who say it can’t be done, are usually interrupted by someone doing it”

6. Understand cheap, fast or easy, pick any two – This is a phrase I use when talking to administrators when they wonder why something isn’t working the way they thought it should. The phrase basically means, you can only two out of the three items. For example, if you want it cheap and easy, it’s not going to be fast. Or if you want it fast and easy, it isn’t going to be cheap.

7. Know how to search – Learn the shortcuts for how to include and exclude search terms. Find out how to search for a particular filetype. If you need a presentation on the water cycle, learn how to search for one (with google use “filetype:ppt” as a search term).

8. Embracing life-long learning – Anything you learn today will be out of date before you retire. We don’t have to sharpen our quills anymore, or learn how to make dittos. Be prepared to learn every day.

9. Creating a personal learning network – Seek out like minded teachers as yourself. Email them, follow their blog, follow them on Twitter. Create your own blog and Twitter account. Learn to share.

10. Owning a home computer – I am totally surprised at the number of teachers that do not own a home computer. The new netbooks are priced at under $400 and desktops around the same price, so price isn’t much of an obstacle. If you can’t afford to buy, check out your local Freecycle or Craigslist for people looking at getting rid of older computers.

Anything I missed?

What I’ve done now is to create a folder called Flagged for each one of my email accounts. Now when I get a message I need to act upon it later, I’ll move it to this Flagged folder.

Sometimes I will just forward the message to my Remember the Milk account, but that’s a post for another day.

In the technology world it seems we’re continually confronted with new products, services, software, hardware, etc. And for those of us who have a tough time focusing on one thing at a time, this dizzying array of choices can easily distract us or keep us from finishing previous tasks.

In The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz it describes why this is a problem:

“We normally assume in America that more options (“easy fit” or “relaxed fit”?) will make us happier, but Schwartz shows the opposite is true, arguing that having all these choices actually goes so far as to erode our psychological well-being.”

As a technology coordinator, I’m constantly trying out new things, and it’s very hard to decide whether to actually implement something. Will this new product be easy enough for staff and students to use? Is the learning curve mild enough that my users will learn this product and use it?

When you ask others in the educational technology community what’s the best wiki, blogging software, operating system, etc. you’ll get a ton of choices. So many choices may ultimately lead you to either never be satisfied with your final choice, or worse, never make a decision.

In this blog I am going to try to only give one or two choices for solutions to specific problems. They may not be the best choice, but in the long run, they will be good enough to be of use (I hope).

Our culture is obsessed with being busy. When’s the last time you asked someone about their job or life and they didn’t use the word busy? It’s worn like a badge of honor. To even hint you might not be busy, conjures up visions of laziness and lack of ambition. As we plan various activities and events for schools, I’ll often hear, “that’s a busy time for schools”. Tell me when it’s not a busy time?

Merlin Mann of 43Folders posits that when one says they are multitasking, they are really just slicing their attention into smaller and smaller chunks.