Engaging Students With Twitter Gadgets

It seems like every day, twitter and a galaxy of satellite applications is making it easier for us to share pictures, music and audio across our twitter network. Recently in our Digital Archiving class we started using twt.fm. to listen to and share music with others in the "twittersphere." Yesterday I asked my students to use twt.fm to post three jazz tunes by three Pennsylvania musicians - Sonny Clark, Lee Morgan and McCoy Tyner. I figured that none of the students would have any of those post-bop musicians on their MP3 players, so I explained to them what is a discography and how to look for specific compositions from a discography. After that little tip, the students found the tracks easily and within minutes the classroom sounded like Ortliebs Jazzhaus.

Listen to a sample here.





Other cool twitter tools we use include TwitterGadget - Twitter Client. This clean little app allows users to submit status updates to Twitter via your iGoogle homepage or Gmail Account.





We use Twitpics for posting pictures directly to twitter. The image below is from Google Maps/Street View. For this activity the students were asked to pick a location in their community where they would like to erect a movie theater.



I blogged about Dial2Do a few weeks ago, a fantastic tool for sending audio messages to twitter. You can also send audio messages to Google Calendar, send audio e-mails, audio text messages and more. I first learned about Dial2Do from blogger and educator Lisa Durff, over what else - my twitter network.




We've also had a lot of fun using twitter to share movies and television shows from hulu.



And the fun and learning doesn't stop there. A few days ago Professor Scott Mcleod posted a tweet about TwitMic a shiny little app for the iPhone that allows users to post crystal clear audio to directly twitter.



Listen to this blog post via TwitMic

H Songhai
5/27/09

Media Literacy/Digital Archiving Final Exam

According to this word cloud there are 39 ways to create a Media Literacy/Digital Archiving final exam, but you (Media Literacy & Digital Archiving students) only need 20. Stay tuned for details.

H Songhai
5/22/09

High School TV Executives in Charge of Programming

Yesterday my Digital Archiving students became TV executives in charge of programming. That's right, high school students - freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors with the authority to create original news and entertainment program lineups for either daytime or prime time television. How did they do that? They did it very easily by creating an account at hulu.com.

Here is how Wikipedia describes hulu



After my students created their hulu accounts and decided on a three hour block of programs, they shared their original lineups on Twitter and embedded their five original episodes on their education blogs.

Hulu.com offers over a dozen channels including news and information, food and leisure, action and adventure, drama, sports, family and music. Hulu is free and streams magically right across your screen. Hulu also offers full length movies! It's really easy to share content from hulu. With one mouse click you can share and post content to a number of social web sites including MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and delicious. But the best part about hulu is being able to watch your favorite TV shows and movies on your cell phone, iPod, laptop or desktop computer whenever and wherever you like. Missed last week's seasons finale of 24? No problem go to hulu.com and watch Jack Bauer and company over and over again. Everything the net has is yours.


Share video content to social networking sites quickly and easily.


H Songhai
5/19/09

Classwork 5/12/09

H Songhai
5/12/09

Cell Phones In The Classroom

If students and their cell phones go together like hand and glove then Dial2Do might help students to use their cell phones more responsibly in the classroom. Dial2Do is a really cool voice to text service that allows users to send e-mails, text messages, and make Twitter posts right from your cell phone. Registered users can also phone in events to Google calendar, record reminders and post to Blogger. Yesterday my Digital Archiving students created Dial2Do accounts and used the service to mark themselves present in Twitter and to send direct e-mails.

As cell phones get smarter and more affordable, it's only a matter of time before our classrooms will have even more students using the voice recorder, camera and bluetooth features of their phones to record assignments, lectures and presentations.

H Songhai
5/12/09

Classwork for 5/8/09

Click here for today's classwork

Fun with Bubblesnaps

Create a Virtual Music Library in Netvibes

Digital archiving is more than scanning, recording, converting and indexing files. It also involves creating virtual archives and libraries in cyberspace. Subscribing to RSS feeds is one of the easiest ways to build a virtual archive. RSS Feeds come in all shapes, sizes and colors: news feeds, blogs, Twitter and photo services are just a few. In my Digital Archiving class I recently created several pages in Netvibes to collect the RSS feeds from all of my student Twitter users. Netvibes really works well as a one-stop spot to collect the daily tweets from my students. Netvibes keeps all of my student feeds together in one neat and organized location.

Another really cool place to subscribe to RSS feeds is at Rhapsody.com.
When visiting Rhapsody.com, look for the RSS feed symbol (see below).
The symbol is listed under your favorite artist or group.


From Rhapsody, click the RSS symbol, then click subscribe, and copy the link address. Next, switch to Netvibes, click Add Content, Add A Feed, then paste the feed into the little window. Add the feed to your Netvibes page and the feed will attach to your feed page.

Here is an example of one of my Public music pages in Netvibes. All of the feeds are from Rhapsody.com.





H Songhai
5/4/09