Since starting #BYOTchat, I’ve received a few questions from fellow Twitter users about how I put together the Twitter Archive on the website.  The process is really quite simple.  I use a program called The Archivist Desktop and Microsoft Excel.

You can download The Archivist Desktop here - it’s a pretty simple program, although it’s unfortuantely Windows-only.  After you run this installer, you’ll see this screen:

From here, just type in the hashtag you’re using for your chat (or whatever it is you’re trying to archive), and click “Get Latest.”  The most recent tweets will populate below.  You can now click “Export To Excel” for the next step in the process.

Fire up Excel, go to Data and click “Import From Text” and click “Finish” – the default settings import the text file.  From there, quickly scan through your tweets, as sometimes parts of the tweet get bumped onto another line, and correct them.

I then delete the ID column, as I don’t use them, and sort by Date then Time – make sure you click “My data has headers.”  After that, you can keep or delete whichever columns you want, and just copy and paste into WordPress, and it shows up cleanly.  We use Auto-Hyperlink to turn all the t.co links into clickable links.

That’s it!  Pretty easy, eh?  Leave a comment if you have any questions or difficulties.

In last week’s #BYOTchat, one of the topics that came up was the idea of “backchanneling.” What is backchanneling, you say? Well, that’s what I’m here to tell you!

Simply put, backchanneling is the process of designating a medium for facilitating the conversation happening around a particular event.

Whenever an event is taking place, there is a swirl of conversations occurring around that event. In the classroom, it can be two kids talking in the back row, passing notes, or sending texts or emails. At public events, these conversations happen all over the place, and tapping into that backchannel helps you tap into the pulse of what your listeners (or students) are thinking right now.

When entertaining the idea of establishing a backchannel in your classroom, the first thing you should realize is that the backchannel already exists; these conversations are already occurring, even if it’s merely inside someone’s head. What you’re doing is establishing a medium through which these conversations can take place that you can tap into.

The other great thing about backchanneling is that it gives students who may be less enthusiastic about sharing during class the freedom to express themselves without the fear that prevents them from raising their hand.

The mediums suggested here have varying levels of privacy and control, so choose the one that suits your desires and objectives.

The first and most obvious backchannel is Twitter, and there are plenty of success stories for classroom use. This video showcases a high school example, whereas this longer video is in a college setting. The benefits to Twitter are that many students already use Twitter, it’s easy to create a hashtag and get started, and students can use their cell phone to easily post comments. With any projector, you can follow that hashtag and use it as a basis for continuing discussion.

The drawback to Twitter should be obvious: you have no control over who uses the hashtag, so external users can drop random tweets into the feed for everyone to see. You also can’t control what your students are saying either, nor can you force them to use their real names (at least not within Twitter itself).

In terms of dedicated backchannel platforms, two were mentioned during the chat:CoverItLive and TodaysMeet. CoverItLive is a live engagement platform targeting bloggers and reporters covering live events. Much of its impressive feature set can be accessed for free without advertising, with 5k reader limit, which should be fine for any classroom. However, because it has such a wide set of features and is targeted towards event coverage, it may be more difficult and slightly overwhelming to get it plugged into your classroom.

TodaysMeet takes the opposite approach and makes the system really simple to use. You go to the home page, create a “room,” and get a link to provide to your students to access that room. From there, it’s effectively a private chat room. Your students enter their name and are able to chat with each other and the teacher during class. It also has a transcript view, providing a chronological view of the chat, as well as a projector view, in reverse chronological order, for live discussion. This makes it easy to get up and running, but doesn’t provide a lot in the way of customization. For most classrooms and teachers getting into backchanneling, this is a great way to get started.

Do you have any experience with backchanneling? Let us know what you think in the comments section.

[Cross-posted at It's Time!]

In our previous chat, several lesson plan suggestions were made based around the idea of project-based inquiry.  In short, project-based inquiry is the idea that instead of giving students the skill first, then hammering in the skill by solving problems, you give the students the problem first, and they develop the skill while attempting to solve it.

Because of this, I wondered whether BYOT would be more effective if the classroom was reorganized in that way.  After some discussion, this will be the topic for the next #BYOTchat!

Is reorganization about project-based inquiry necessary to maximize BYOT effectiveness?  How does this maximize BYOT effectiveness?  How do we reorganize the classroom around project-based inquiry and BYOT?

These are just a few questions to get your thinking caps on.  I’m sure more questions will arise during the chat, and I look forward to discussing this in more detail.

Join us every Thursday, from 9-10PM EST, for #BYOTchat to discuss this exciting topic!

Cybraryman Resources:

• Twitter
• Polls
• Edmodo
• Evernote

I’ll start with Cybraryman’s resources.  I really appreciate the amount of time he puts into building these pages.  They have a ton of content and ideas, and I would encourage everyone to check out those pages after reading through some of the sites provided here, as he gives some really useful insight for some of the things that are shared below.

Evernote

Evernote is an app that is near and dear to my heart.  While I haven’t explored all the possibilities that Evernote provides, there already is a ton you can do with it.  For starters, it’s a cloud-based notebook for you to store notes, files, web clippings, and anything else you may need to reference.  These are accessible through a desktop app, mobile apps, and a web interface.  Here are some resources for using Evernote specifically for education:

• Educational Technology Guy
• Tech&Learning
• Web 2.0 Classroom

As well as the Cybraryman page above.

Classroom Social Networks

There were three networks that were shared with us in last week’s #BYOTchat:

• EdModo
• Schoology
• Twiducate

Basically, all three of these are “walled garden” social networks, allowing you to manage the members to people who are actually in your class or school.  This provides a space for you and your students to collaborate without needing to let outsiders in.  Schoology has this comparison (which is obviously skewed in their favor), but Schoology does provide an LMS, which the other two don’t appear to do.

Socrative

This program actually appears to be extremely useful and easy for a BYOT classroom.  Socrative is a student-response system; you can do quick exercises, games, questions, and a wide variety of other activities as well.  All of these are fed back into a teacher’s platform, allowing them to generate reports and tailor their teaching based on this information, and all of this can be done from any web-enabled device.

Collaborative Spaces

There were a few things I’m dubbing “collaborative spaces” even though they’re each kind of different:

• Groupboard
• Etherpad
• TodaysMeet
• WikiSpaces

Groupboard and EtherPad are designed for real-time collaboration.  They provide a whiteboard-type space that everyone can log into and manipulate together in real-time.  TodaysMeet is a backchannel conversation space that is more focused on audience-to-audience (or in your case, student-to-student) interaction.  WikiSpaces is a wiki, like Wikipedia, which is designed more as a non-real-time collaboration space.

Lastly, I wanted to share this YouTube video from that chat about The Twitter Experiment.  I hope that provides some insight into ways you can incorporate Twitter into your classroom.

After last week’s #BYOTchat on how to begin a new BYOT program, we decided to focus this week’s chat  on professional development (PD) (or professional learning.) I started off by throwing this question out:

“…to the teachers, what GOOD PD have you experienced? What made it good?”

There were a few enlightening responses; @cbraryman1 said the best PD he ever had was hands-on learning, and @hugghinss said Twitter itself was the best PD!  @40ishoracle mentioned a “tech petting zoo,” and shared with us a picture of what that would look like.”

This lead to a discussion about how to approach PD.  More specifically, how structured should BYOT PD be?  @SteveHayes_RB60 said the best PD is self-motivated learning, but commented that not all teachers are able to dedicate that time and energy into figuring out which resources are good, who to connect with, and how to integrate some of those resources into their classroom.  I suggested part of PD be aiding teachers in establishing a method for continuing self-study – blogs to subscribe to, Twitter users to follow, and other websites with useful resources.  In addition, the need to merely provide time for teachers to collaborate with each other and share came up a few times, with a reference to “Google 20% time” as a model.

The entire question of what level of guidance versus on-your-own-learning was never quite settled; a lot of it really depends on the comfort level of the teachers involved.  If most of the teachers are at a point where they’re just beginning to use technology, then the PD process has to be more hand-holding, whereas teachers who have some level of comfort with technology may just need some help with classroom use.

The discussion focused mostly on the actual learning of the technology, rather than getting into how to deal with various issues that may come up during the day.  In our previous chat, we talked a lot about how to manage tech support for many devices, and including this information in PD is necessary, but we didn’t touch on it during the chat.  This EdWeek article talks about some of the policy issues that can arise with BYOT, and I expect we’ll discuss some of these issues in more depth in future chats.

Ultimately, PD has to be focused on the needs, desires, and time constraints of the teachers using it.  Some teachers prefer to be more collaborative, some need more structure, some just need more time, and providing the right learning environment for teachers is crucial to successful PD.

[Cross-posted at It's Time!]

Not to repeat myself over and over (but I will anyway!), but thanks so much to everyone who came out last night to participate in our first #BYOTchat. We got a lot of participation, and I’m sure it will only grow from there.

The topic of the first chat was “What should be the first steps to take in implementing BYOT?” and even before you get to any actual actions, setting expectations for all participants was the first place we started. Getting all your stakeholders (administrators, teachers, support staff, parents, and students) all on the same page is hugely important to getting everyone to buy in to the idea, as not everyone is always sold on the use of technology in the classroom (especially cell phones!). @cybraryman1 has some great resources on Acceptable Use Policies.

However, the distinction between “acceptable” to “responsible” use is an important one – students (and teachers!) must learn how their actions in the digital space impact the real world. You can’t have students goofing off with the technology in class, and everything you do online leaves behind a digital footprint which can be found and used by anyone with access. What it means to be responsible in the digital space is an idea that’s still being developed, but having an open conversation about consequences and pitfalls online is going be a real help to students.

But not only students – adults too! We typically know what it means to be responsible (online and off), but taking the time to crystalize it is helpful in passing on those skills to students while they use tech in this classroom.

If all of this feels a bit “high-brow,” what it leads to is the real need for Professional Development (PD). Everyone who participated last night was in resounding agreement that the only way you can implement an effective BYOT program is by supporting teachers. You need to make it easy to integrate technology into the classroom, and you need to provide the resources to do so. @hauquitz suggested the development of an app list, broken down by device, subject, and price.

PD is not merely a “teaching of teachers” – it’s also a forum for teachers to connect with each other. As @mluhtala said “Don’t try to convince the unconvinceable – just work with the open minded ones. The rest’ll come EVENTUALLY” – and it’s true. The early adopters become the ones who test different techniques, and PD becomes an avenue for them to share their experiences with other teachers. Once they see that, yes, it is, in fact, possible to use technology for learning in the classroom, they’ll do it. Twitter itself has become a great resource for that as well. As I said myself, sometimes the best cheerleaders for BYOT are other teachers.

Ah – but not just teachers: STUDENTS! Kids are increasingly more tech-savvy than their older brethren, and they have a lot they can share with us. I mentioned myself that we have a lot of students in Time To Know classrooms who support the teachers with the technology. “Students must be at the center of district decisions. Teachers must be open to student point of view.”

Students can also do their own tech support. “@dimatiata is the @nchslmc Director of Mobile Devices. He’s 17. Kids can handle it!” Which is I really think is awesome – go @dimatiata! Tech support would be inundated with requests if every problem you had with your phone went to them.

Once you’ve laid the groundwork, the last thing is getting the network to support this level of bandwidth and connectivity. @SteveHayes_RB60 asked me if we needed to support 2-3 devices per student; I responded that they tend to have that many, but that you didn’t necessarily need to support that much bandwidth. However, I was quickly corrected – @msmith833 didn’t agree, and @MyTakeOnIt said he recommended aiming for 3 devices per user. I would amend my statement now to say you should aim for 3:1 but don’t fret if you don’t get there – supporting any level of BYOT is a step in the right direction.

This discussion lead to the question of control – @msmith said she was fighting with admins who want to get control of students, and even some parents don’t think devices should be used in schools. The fear of student distraction is a strong one, but one that should be easily overcome with proper integration. @MyTakeOnIt and I both made similar comments about technology being engaging on its own, and students won’t be distracted if they’re too busy using them for good. @mluhtala morphed a quote into “Don’t let media distract from learning, let learning distract from media!”

And that’s really the point here, isn’t it? Technology fosters more engaged learning, and ultimately better learning.  And that’s why we want to do this.

There was a ton of mini-conversations about smaller topics not covered here, and I highly recommend you read through the archive.

I look forward to doing this again next week! Look for a poll about next week’s topic on Monday.

[Cross-posted @ It's Time!]