A Project: A Tweet Away

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.

Note: Blogger Post by Email Help

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?"

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Go boldly and scatter seeds of kindness... Reflect curiosity and wonder... Live to make the world less difficult for each other. ~ George Eliot