My Professional Learning Network (5 of 5): Mobile Services (Twitter and Google Mobile)

Twitter

 
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, email or through an application such as Twitterrific

Twitter is one of the ways that I can connect very quickly with educators around the globe. It also allows me to ask my ‘twitter’ followers questions. For example, a few weeks ago I was in a staff in-service training session on A Curriculum for Excellence and Literacy. I was having a bit of trouble trying to get my head around exactly what we meant by Literacy for the 21^st Century. So, while the presentation was going on I ‘twittered’ the question out to my network.

By the end of the session I had a number of responses that had helped me form my own definition of Literacy for the 21^st Century and I was able to share the ‘tweets’ with some of my group.

Twitter also has a number of really good uses for gathering data in the classroom. The other day, for example, I received a ‘tweet’ from Tom Barrett who was looking for some real weather data to study with his primary class. Tom asked in a ‘tweet’ what the weather was like and where were from. He managed to gather some real, special data very quickly that he was able to use with his class.

 

Google Mobile Services

 

Google Mobile is basically how I try and organise my life and my phone helps bind all of these applications together. The main Google Applications that I use on my phone are:

Google Calendar

My on-line calendar helps me keep on top / manage my appointments. Most of the calendar is public which means it can be viewed by the office staff at MGS.

 

Google Reader

I talked about Google Reader on Wednesday. Google Reader Mobile helps me keep on top of my feeds when I have aspare five minutes.
 

Email

All of my accounts are set to ‘push’ directly to my phone. This means if I choose to I can check things on the move.

Google Doc’s

I can also access my collaborative documents straight from my phone and work / edit these if I need to.

 

Google Maps, Talk, Social Bookmarking and Social Networking Sites

Again I can access all of the above service on the move.

 

For me a nomadic learning is about learning at any time, in any place, if you choose to. Choice still must be one of the most important things when developing your own personal learning network.