Digital Society - Social Networks - Twitter - Websites

Description from resource

Did you know that your tweets have an expiration date on them? While they never really disappear from your own Twitter stream, they become unsearchable in only a matter of days.  At first, Twitter held onto your tweets for around a month, but as the service grew more popular, this "date limit" has dramatically shortened. According to Twitter's search documentation, the current date limit on the search index is "around 1.5 weeks but is dynamic and subject to shrink as the number of tweets per day continues to grow."

What that means is something tweeted prior to a week and a half ago can never be retrieved viasearch.twitter.com. That's bad for users and it's definitely bad for data-mining. Unless Twitter corrects this issue on its own, we have to find another solution for archiving tweets ourselves. Here are 10 ways to do so.

@teachesict

Live in 1943 for three weeks in the social network of four Londoners. They share their everyday lives with you as it happens. The stories are based on real people and real events. The project runs on Twitter until Remembrance Day — 11.11.11.

Twitter’s popularity has soared recently, and for good reason. What started as a simple way to update friends about daily life has grown into a powerful tool for business, communication, and education. While many campuses are just picking up on the educational rewards possible with Twitter, there is still plenty of room to create new and exciting ways to use Twitter on campus. The following tips will help you know just how to get started using Twitter in academia, teach you etiquette, offer strategies and benefits, provide suggestions for specific ways to use Twitter, list tools to use with Twitter, and more.

Using Twitter in education has been all the buzz recently. If you are ready to start using Twitter yourself and need a little help getting started or have already been using it and can use a little extra help, then these tutorials are just for you. From getting started to ways to use Twitter more effectively to using Twitter tools to applications and suggestions for Twitter use in the classroom, these tutorials will provide you with tons of knowledge and ideas to get you going.

To keep things simple we’re sharing a tidbit with a link to some of the more popular twitter tools in use today. This is part 1 of 6 and we are beginning with twitter tools and apps “For Fun and More”

@skeeterhansen 

@alferretti

This is part 2 of 6, twitter tools and apps “WordPress Plugins for your blog”. To keep things simple, we’re sharing a tidbit with a link to some of the more popular wordpress plugins that integrate with Twitter.

Twitter is becoming more popular and if you have a wordpress blog, it is a good time for you to incorporate Twitter into your blog.

@skeeterhansen 

@alferretti

@skeeterhansen 

@alferretti

Photo and Video sharing on Twitter has become more and more popular. While many of you have taken advantage of Twitpic for photo sharing. Here’s some additional places you may want to consider next time you would like to share a picture and/or a video.

@skeeterhansen 

@alferretti

Lately, we have heard that local business owners think Twitter is not for them. Their perception is that Twitter is mainly for those targeting the national or global market and not people in their town. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

If you have a hometown business that primarily serves people in your local community, (not across the entire world) then check out the resourceful tools listed below to find and network with people in your local community.

@skeeterhansen 

@alferretti

Last year I ran a history project with a small group of Year 6 children. This project looked at the Gunpowder Plot and specifically the events following Guy Fawkes’ capture. The idea of this project was to explore how web 2:0 tools could be used in history lessons. I wanted the children to be able to research the events and then use the Internet to present their research in a variety of ways.

One of the most successful parts of the project was the Twitter account of Robert Catesby. Catesby was the mastermind of the plot and the children tweeted his story as he fled from London following the plots discovery. The children researched the events and wrote out their tweets before scheduling them for delivery using hootsuite. The tweets ran from the morning of the 5th November until the final standoff at Holbeche House on the 8th.

Characters involved in the Gunpowder Tweeting and Plot project 2010

For some reason ideas always seem to hit me as I am doing the washing up. Tonight’s idea will use Twitter to set my year 7 class an Internet research challenge. Basically I want people to tweet a set of clues about a person – the children will then research the information in order to identify the person.

So I am asking for people to tweet some clues about anybody to do with the following topic – ICT Pioneers.

For example if I was thinking of Bill Gates I might tweet:

I was born on October 28th 1955 and I am best known for the company I founded with Paul Allen. #twittwho

Please join in and I am intrigued to find out who you would consider to be an ICT Pioneer. Please remember to include the hashtag #twittwho and could you also schedule your tweet to arrive sometime between 9.10 am and 9.50 am on Friday morning. I would also appreciate it if you would tweet me separately to let me know you have contributed some clues. If I don’t get enough contributions I may have to abort the plan.

Here’s my idea for a Twitter based quiz to experiment with scheduled tweets.

I have created the twitter account @twuizmaster

I will schedule a series of questions such as…

Name one of the Three Wise Men.

People taking part will then respond with one of the three names. If they match the name I have chosen and already scheduled to be sent after a short period of time they will get a point.

for example

at 19:00 the following tweet will be sent

@twuizmaster Name one of the Three Wise Men #twuizQ1

responses will then arrive i.e.

@chrisleach78 Balthazar #twuizQ1

at 19:02 the answer and next question will be sent.

@twuizmaster Melchior. Name one of the Famous Five. #twuizQ2

and so on. Notice the hashtags change for each question.

Last night I ran a trial of my Twuiz Night idea using tweets scheduled in Tweetdeck. Here is how it went. 

Yesterday I had the following idea:

I am going to set up a twitter account (@TTNewsReport) which I will make available for any teacher to use with their class. The idea is to use it as a way of reporting historical events that your class may be studying in the style of @SkyNewsBreak

for example a class might tweet

@TTNewsReport: 2 Sep 1666 – We are getting reports of a fire in the Pudding Lane area of London.

or

@TTNewsReport: 19 May 1536 – The execution of Anne Boleyn is about to take place.

This could be used as a plenary at the end of a history to summarise the events that the class have been studying. If parents support the idea keen children could even continue the project at home. 

Earlier this afternoon @TTNewsReport starting tweeting headlines from Ancient Egypt thanks to @ictast who had used the account with his class. Here are some of their tweets.

2500BC: Sphinx at Giza carved out of local stone. Said to be biggest sculpture in the world!

Nov 4th 1922: Howard Carter stood at the entrance to a great tomb. Who is inside it?

9th March 1660BC: 400 years of peace has ended. Foreigners are taking over Egypt.

It would be fantastic if more schools got involved, so if you teach history and would like your class to contribute please get in touch. I’m @chrisleach78 on Twitter.

Tomorrow I will be heading off to Ross-on-Wye with all of Year 6 for a few days of camping, canoeing, climbing and trekking. I will be using the school’s Twitter account (@wh_school) to send updates. There is also a Year 7 and Year 5 expedition at the same time and so to filter the tweets we will be using the following hashtags #whsy7, #whsy6 and #whsy5. I have used the site www.tweetwally.com to display all the tweets from the school's Twitter account that include each of the hashtags.

On the 7th February next year it will be 200 years since the birth of Charles Dickens and I am sure there will be many events planned to mark the occasion. The idea I had was for school’s to work together to tweet / blog as characters from Dickens’ novels in order to retell the story. The project could run from the 7th February to the 9th June (anniversary of his death). 

In my previous post I introduced an idea I had to celebrate Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday. The idea is basically for schools to use Twitter / blogs etc to retell some of Dickens’ novels. I wasn’t sure exactly to manage this and last night I had a bit of a brainwave.

The basic element of the project that any schools taking part would be asked to do is to get children and adults to record sections of one of Dickens’ novels using Audioboo. These can then be automatically tweeted with a common hashtag so that they can all be followed. Schools could then do further work blogging or tweeting as different characters.

To try out the idea I have started to record A Christmas Carol.

If you were following @pf_scrooge on Twitter in the run up to Christmas, you will have seen the miserable Ebeneezer Scrooge be transformed from a miserable hater of Christmas into a man who now loves sharing his kindness with others.

I was inspired to set up the account after following the exploits of @LCS_RCatesby (aka Robert Catesby) who had been tweeting about the events leading up to, and the aftermath of, the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. @chrisleach78 has already blogged about how he set up and ran this project with a group of Year 6 children from Little Common Primary School, but I wanted to post about how I ran my project at Parkfield to share my own experiences of it.

Firstly, my tweets weren’t even going to be based on A Christmas Carol at first – originally they were to instead be seemingly written by Mary in the days leading up to the birth of Jesus. Unfortunately in my research I discovered that all the elements of what children would call ‘The Nativity Story’ either didn’t happen according to the Bible (e.g. no donkey) or happened many days or weeks later (e.g. the official naming of Jesus). Having found this out, I therefore concluded that it would perhaps be both easier and more interesting for the children to tweet about Scrooge’s adventures in the classic novel by Dickens.

So, I then set off in search of the original novel (a copy of which can be found here) only to once again be faced with a problem – there was no way in a couple of sessions with my ICT club children that they were going to be able to read the entire story, let alone re-interpret it from the viewpoint of Scrooge! Quite by chance though, I quickly came across this quite good summary of the story online which was much more readable, and which broke it down into 5 short chapters. [Edit Nov 2010 - This link doesn't seem to be working anymore, but here's my amended copy of it instead.]

From this, I then came up with the idea that each child (or pair) could work on the tweets for just one chapter, which could then be combined together in the final Twitter timeline. I opted to use Etherpad to get them to simultaneously draft the 7 tweets which I decided would be appropriate to convey the happenings in each chapter. All the children, as expected, loved using this site and watching everyone’s contribution to the story build up as they typed.