Sunday, October 30, 2011

Backstory of a Tweet

I just tweeted. No big deal really. It was a quote from an Educational Leadership article I was reading. But, in case you weren't aware of how teaching and learning is happening now in today's university, here's the gist of what happened:

  • In my online class, I posted an assignment on Blackboard for students to find & read good articles on how schools at changing.
  • My students log in and read the assignment.
  • They log into our university library and find the e-version of the journal.
  • One of my students, B, selects an article on today's tech savy students.
  • He reads the PDF of the article.
  • He posts a summary of the article and the PDF in Blackboard for his peers in the course.
  • I click through all of their posts on my laptop as I grade their article submissions.
  • His article catches my eye.
  • I don't want to forget to read it; so, I email the PDF to myself as a reminder.
  • Later I'm sitting by the fire taking it easy. I'm listening to music on my iPad.
  • I see the article in my email and decide to take a look.
  • I realize I think I'll want to hang on to the article for future reference, so I open it in iBooks.
  • One paragraph catches my eye, and I think about tweeting it out.
  • I zoom in on the paragraph with a flick of two fingers, and click with my iPad to screen capture an image of the paragraph.
  • I open Twitter, type in my tweet, and attach the paragraph image.
  • The good find from one of my students is now out to my 300+ followers, one of which is B from my course.

And, it took me as long to write this post as it did to read the article and post the tweet.