Getting the Most From Your Social Media Experience

Twitter is great, but expressing yourself in 140 characters isn't easy. Neither is it easy to keep track of all the ideas and resources that spill through your timeline.

A lot of sharing is done off the social network site through other methods.

A dropbox account means that you can share resources, as it is possible to tweet a link to the resources, which others can then copy to their own dropbox account, or download directly.

A blog means that you can express yourself in more than 140 characters when necessary - like I am doing now. Tags in blogs mean that if you have made a point previous on your blog you can find it again and refer someone to the post.

Pinterest is great for categorising and storing images, and images with links to websites. Downloading the button for your browser makes it easier, or in the mobile twitter app you can get the link to the tweet and pin the images in it.

Pocket is a great app/website, it is a 'read later' service, that allows you to bookmark tweets and links in tweets. On the web browser version you can also add tags to make finding links easier.

Feedly is a great app and website for reading blogs. There are so many tweeters now with blogs, and feedly brings the posts directly to you. Sometimes I don't bother with twitter, preferring to read the blog posts. If you do find a good blog post in feedly it also allows you to post to twitter to share.

Other services to consider are evernote and google. They can also be useful for sharing and saving the resources you find. I also like bit.ly as it allows you to create shortened links with a URL you chose.

Pinterest as a teaching tool

I saw an infographic, tweeted by @PookyH, about Pinterest. The link is here: http://www.pookyshares.com/2012/03/the-power-of-pinterest-infographic/

I like pinterest a lot. I use Delicious for social bookmarking, but I think that Pinterest has more potential. I like the idea of being able to group the images into categories. The organisation in folders means that it is much easier to find the resource.

I plan to use this resource with students so they can find links to help them if they miss lessons or need to recap aspects of topics.

However, to really make the most of pinterest I need to make my own infographics and videos to upload to ensure that all the areas are covered.

Organising Resources

I noticed on a few blogs I've read teachers leaving pages for websites they've found. I use delicious to store links to websites, but I don't often retrieve them, I collect and hoard.

In my department staff use folders with paper and plastic wallets to store schemes of work. Mine are stored electronically these days, but how organised are they really? How useful on a day-to-day basis is the the information stored between the school shared drive, my mobile phone, my iPad, iCloud, Dropbox and my computer?

I am increasingly aware that moving away from paper is not going to be a practical solution. I give out worksheets to the students and if there is spare I don't want to throw them out.

I have decided that I'll use pinterest to organise links, (mainly videos and distinct resources) by the topic I'm teaching. I'll continue to use delicious for all links, but I do want to review the tags I'm using.

I have 100GB on dropbox. I am going to reorganise these files and reconsider the folders I am currently sharing. Leaving the majority. I will move my folders away from being only on my hard drive. I need to sort these folders too. They are organised by year, not only by topic. But should I be using iCloud?

There is so many wonderful resources out there, I do wonder if I'll ever have the perfect way to organise and store them! I suppose the way to do it has evolved over the past 10 years and will continue to.

All this is before considering the various applications available to organise calendars, notes, reminders etc.

Location:Rudgleigh Ave,Easton-in-Gordano,United Kingdom

Using social bookmarking

I find or I am sent so many useful links to websites with great resources and ideas. But I am not always in a position to use them straight away for a variety of reasons.

I used to keep a word document of useful links. It wasn't easy to search and formatting was tricky. Now I use social bookmarking. I found out about it when reading an article in a teaching magazine. At first I just tried it, adding websites that I already know about and gradually my use has increased.

The site I use is called delicious. You can create "stacks" meaning it is even easier to keep related bookmarks together and browse them. I also have apps on the iPad that make it even easier to add and search the websites I have bookmarked.

As the resources available on the Internet expand social bookmarking is a great way to keep track of the useful things I have seen. Try it.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad