We’re prepping to talk about Twitter in our ed tech course for preservice teachers for Friday. Based on their blog posts so far, they are not very excited about it (sorry, folks). I have found Twitter to be an invaluable source for shorthand information about books and articles to read, tech tools to consider, or conference messages. And I also think there are useful tools that could be employed in the classroom: students tweeting key points, tweeting in the voice of historical or literary characters, or as an alternative to clickers to quickly get information.

Here’s one tool that might be useful. If you go to http://feeds.allofme.com, you can paste in an RSS feed (a blog or a Twitter feed) and see the posts placed along a timeline. Then you can grab the embed code to put the timeline into your blog, wiki, or Web page.

Below is one for the White House’s Twitter feed.

How might turning a Twitter feed into a visual timeline help students gain greater understanding of a current event? What other Twitter feeds might be useful?

UM alum Ryan Goble is in yesterday’s New York Times sharing several tools for “mindful” technology use in the classroom. Several of the tools (such as Museum Box, Wordle, Professor Garfield’s Comics Lab, and Glogster) are also on the current or 2009 AASL Best Websites for Teaching and Learning list as well!

Tech Tips For Teachers: Free, Easy and Useful Creation Tools - The Learning Network Blog - NYTimes.com via kwout

Prezi! Glogster! Museum Box! and more! All part of AASL’s 2010 update to the Best Websites for Teaching and Learning list. Check out the new list here:

ALA | Top 25 | Best Websites for Teaching and Learning via kwout