Today in class we learned how to set up and operate the organization tool, “Trello” and the social media platform, “Twitter”.

We covered the following technology competencies: Collaboration (Trello) and Social Media (Twitter).

We will be using Trello for our Free Inquiry and EdTech Inquiry projects, as they allow you to collaboratively share, delegate, and organize tasks on a single platform. This is done through creating a “board” which you can create and share with others. You can fully customize this board by changing the name and even the background colours and photos. Once the board is created and shared, everyone (who holds an “admin” role) can add, edit, and delete “lists” which hold different “cards” to delegate tasks among your group.  You can move cards between different lists, ie). moving a “research teaching techniques” card from a “to do” to a “done” list. Trello is a really great resource to use for group projects as one of the most significant obstacles is trying to coordinate everyone’s busy schedules to find time to delegate and organize tasks. From a teaching perspective, professors or teachers can add themselves to students’ board and this servers as a great way to actively observe and assess student progress. I look forward to using Trello for future group projects and as a teaching resource in the future!

Today we also learned about “Twitter” and “Tweetdeck”. We talked in class about how Twitter, like most social media platforms, can be extremely powerful if used for the right reasons. I used to have a Twitter account a long time ago, but I quickly grew disinterested in it, finding it to be an unnecessary stream of content to my life. However, as it was strongly encouraged in class, I decided to give it another chance! This time, I geared it entirely towards teaching as I have no desire to use it as anything other than a professional tool to interact with other educators and the wealth of knowledge they share. I learnt how to fully customize my account, from my profile picture and bio information to following hashtags and subscribe to lists. We then learned how to use Tweetdeck! Tweetdeck is a sort of organization tool for Twitter. It filters out your feed into separate streams, making it easier to find what you’re looking for (and equally, to ignore the information you aren’t). Currently, I have set up my Tweetdeck into the following columns/streams: #edci336 so that I can easily see anyone who posts using our class hashtag, the BC Education list curated by @ChrisWejr so I can follow along with information posted under this list, anything posted by the @uvic user, another for following @UvicTeacherEd, and one for following Trending topics!  I am really glad that I have learned how to use Tweetdeck as a resource because I believe it makes Twitter much more engaging and easier to sort through, and I think it will contribute greatly to me being able to enjoy Twitter more this time around!

Feel free to give me a follow on Twitter!

-Jess