Summer 2020 Blog Fest
Laura, our mentor in our journey about networked blogging and the benefits of blogging, suggests we start a project, for which she shares two of hers:
Twitter Highlights: blog posts with interesting, annotated Twitter highlights, tagged with "Twitter Highlights" -- check the bottom of a post to see the tag
Dabbles: Stories in 100 Words [or less]: a collection of such stories
My Project: Tweet Curation for Research
I have a project already set up. It's called: So. Consider.
I cannot believe I started it in 2012.
But blogs have many purposes, and I think blogs are perfect places to gather and curate. I wanted a place to share bits of interesting blog posts or tweets-- and it became [along with Diigo], a place to post tweets for things that:
- are interesting
- could be part of a current research project
- seem important for the times
- may be words of wisdom
- are usually about education, but now could be covid or democracy or social justice
But the blog is available for others to "search" as well.
How to Post
I post the tweets through a "secret" email to my blog. You can do this with any blog, I think. Look for "Post using email" in your settings.
These posts started as annotation and short reflections, but soon -- when I began a much busier teacher, tech coach, tech advocate at school-- it became simply a repository for items about education that could help in some way: documentations, lessons, strategies, support, research-- found in tweets. It's the simplest form of curation, a place I could return to consider the ideas or share them with others, which is why the name:
So (call for attention, inquiry, discovery)
Consider (careful thought – Latin, considerare ‘examine')
Lately, so much attention, of course, is being discussed about #remotelearning that I have been posting good resources for virtual, digital teaching and learning.
For this WordPress blog, I follow my twitter feed on my iPhone. I just click the arrow at bottom right in the Tweet:
Then choose "share Tweet via"
Then click the Mail icon to add the secret email address. It's secret because I only want myself using it!
The subject line is the "Tweet from..." info and I sometimes change that to the topic.
In another WordPress blog I have categories I can post to. I should set up categories for this blog too. It's a WordPress trick. It is supposed to work with tags, too, but that never works for me. In the body of my text I write the categories I already have using this format, including the brackets:
[category x, y, z]
[tags x, y z]
It's pretty slick, and I need to consider this for my So Consider blog.
The Cool Thing: Search
The cool thing, though, is I placed my "search" box right at the top of the sidebar. So, if I insert a key word, like "remote," the search engine finds all the posts with that word in it. And that's the purpose of the blog-- it's for me to search for the tweets of my peers about topics on which I am working or blogging. And, of course, others may search as well.
It helped with links of research in my other blogs whenever I wondered "What Else?"
Go boldly and scatter seeds of kindness... Reflect curiosity and wonder... Live to make the world less difficult for each other. ~ George Eliot
Oh, this information about your workflow is fascinating, Sheri! I don't do work on my phone ever (I just read Kindle books if I don't have access to my laptop)... but now you've got me thinking that this email trick would be a way to make the phone a more productive tool for me. Reading this makes me think I should write up my blog-Diigo workflow in case that might be useful to others too, so when I get to writing about Diigo later I'll add a note about that and ping you, especially since you are a Diigo-user too! THANK YOU for this post!
ReplyDeleteYeah. My phone is not a phone. It's camera, photo album [auto upload to Google Photos], research, family chat, news review, twitter, upload to IG for art [no iPad app], calendar, timer.
DeleteI am so glad this was helpful to you, and I can hardly wait for the Diigo post. :) My students loved Diigo. I wrote about Diigo in writing class way back in 2009: Diigo in Writing Class