 Good morning, everyone. This is Michael Sowers, your guest host today for Encompass Live, the weekly online event from the Nebraska Library Commission. Krista is on vacation this week, and this is also the Tech Talk episode, so I'm running the show on my own today. So if we have any technical issues, because I don't do this very often, please bear with me on that. Encompass Live is our weekly show in which we feature topics of interest to Nebraska librarians and the librarians from all over the world. We have guest speakers, we have commission staff that presents, and once a month, usually the last Wednesday of the month, we do Tech Talk with me, Michael Sowers, the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Library Commission. And today we have Cynthia Stodgdill, a returning guest. Cynthia was on back in May with covering Google Apps for Education, and she is the school librarian at the Bellfield Millican Park Elementary School in Fremont, Nebraska. And we noticed during her last session that she did a lot with Twitter. We asked a couple questions about that at the end, and she made the wonderful for us mistake of saying, sure, I'll come back on and I'll talk about how we use Twitter. And so I was able to grab her once again before the school year started up. So, Cynthia, good morning, and how you doing? Good morning. I'm doing well. Thank you for having me back. I'm excited. All right. So we've got your presentation up there on the screen. What do you do with Twitter? Well, this is one of my favorite things to talk about. I could talk for days on Twitter and how we can use it to promote our libraries and in education. So I'm just excited to share this with all of you. And let's see. Once again, I'm Cynthia Stodgdill. I am a school librarian at Fremont Public Schools, and I was in two elementaries last year, and this year I'm moving to Johnson Crossing and the Middle School. So I'm moving up from K-4 to 5-6 and 7-8. So that'll be a change for me, and I'm really excited to start that new adventure. And so just a little bit about myself. Michael actually found me through my blog, The Tangled Librarian, and that's just kind of a log or diary of kind of my journey as a library professional. And there's a lot of stuff in there, things I don't want to forget, things I want to celebrate. It's kind of a nice thing to go back to and kind of remember where I've been and how much I've grown and that hopefully other librarians will see that when they're starting out and maybe not find themselves quite so alone. So the presentation that I'm showing you today will be on there as well as on the Gankampa's website. So it'll be in a couple places for you to check out any additional resources. So when I talk about Twitter, I've kind of tweaked this over the years that I've talked about Twitter in schools and libraries. And the one thing I kind of want to start with this time is to talk about Twitter and how you use it personally. And you really kind of have to know who you want to be with Twitter or with social media. And I'll say up front, I'm not a huge Facebook fan, but if Facebook is what works for you, you can definitely transition any of this to Facebook. Twitter is just what worked for me. That's where I'm comfortable and that seems to work for me professionally. So but it will certainly transfer to some other medium if that's what works for you. But when you are talking about Twitter, you really want to know who you are as a presence and what your goal is in terms of using Twitter professionally and in your library and in education. And so something I came across about a couple years ago was a Twitterosophy. And it's just kind of a little statement. It's kind of like your own personal mission statement. But what exactly do you want to accomplish with your social media resource? Who do you want to be? Where do you want? What do you want yourself to look like? Because it's very easy to get your personal and your professional lives mixed up in social media. And I try to be very mindful of the fact that I want to be able to show my students my Twitter account or my Twitter feed at any time and use that kind of as a model for digital citizenship. So I am very kind of just always keep that in mind. At one point, I had two accounts. I did have a library account and a personal account. And that's certainly something that you can do. When I moved from K-12 to K-4, I did not add a library account when I went to Fremont because those kids probably weren't on Twitter. As I'm moving back into middle school, that's something I'm thinking about but I haven't made a decision yet. But you really want to think about who are you and who do you want to be and what does that footprint look like? Because you're going to be a model to your students and to your community. So when you are talking about branding, branding is really just creating a presence with your school or your library. And this certainly applies to public libraries as well as schools. But the thing you want to remember is the best way to predict your future is to create it. If you tell your story, people will hear it. If you don't tell your story, trust me, someone else will. And we're going to talk more about that in a little bit. But I love this quote by Abraham Lincoln. I'm a huge Abraham Lincoln fan. Also Thomas Jefferson, another one of my favorites. But I love this quote because it really does kind of hit the nail on the head in terms of what we can do with Twitter. So what not to do? This is an article that came out last November. And I was driving home from school listening to public radio. And this news clip came on about JP Morgan. And JP Morgan wanted to jump into the social media ring and talk to some college students about their company and what their image was. And they kind of wanted to promote themselves to some young up and coming professionals. And so they created a hashtag and they decided we're going to go do a chat and we're going to have people talk about how great we are and it really backfired. And the reason that it backfired on them was because they jumped into social media with no investment prior to their chat. They just thought we'll create a chat. We'll start talking. Everybody loves us and nobody will say anything bad. And as you can see on the screen, one of the comments that was tweeted during that chat was how many JP Morgan bankers does it take to screw in a light bulb? None. They just foreclose on the house. And that's kind of the way the entire chat went. And it didn't take very long for them to say, well, I think we're done with the chat for today. They kind of backtracked and ran off with their tail between their legs. And it was really kind of turned into a social media nightmare for them because they thought by just jumping into Twitter, everybody would know who they were. Everyone would know what they stood for. But they hadn't put any investment into the game. They just made a lot of assumptions. And so one of the things that you want to do when you are thinking about using Twitter for branding your district or branding your library is you really want to start when nobody knows anything about you. You want to be the first one talking about your school, your library, what you're doing, your students, that kind of thing. Because if you don't start that conversation, if you don't create that account and start talking about yourself, someone else will. And then it can turn very negative. So this is my favorite example. I love this. It's such a great example of someone in a huge corporation, not understanding that they really should have started kind of promoting themselves in a positive way prior to going out and asking people for input. So when you're talking about branding with Twitter, there's some main components. You really want to use it to grow. You want to really be prepared to collaborate with your stakeholders. You want to be able to share what you're doing. You need to celebrate your victories. You need to celebrate your students, celebrate your staff. You want to be able to give. You want to give information. You want to give secret tweets where people can maybe come in and get something that nobody else can. And you really want to support each other. If you are in a district where you might have several schools with a Twitter account, you want to retweet each other and you want to support each other and share all that information because you might be reaching some stakeholders that may be another group of people in your district may not be. And so it's just a courtesy to support the group as a whole. And honestly, most of the stuff that I get or that I've learned about social media is from this amazing book, The Librarian's Nitty Gritty Guide to Social Media. Love, love this book. Go buy it. It's really awesome. And it really talks about specifically libraries and social media and kind of just a step-by-step. Here's how you start. Here's some do's. Here's some don'ts. Here's where it can take you. Here's some plans and just kind of the whole process in a nutshell. So that is such a great, great resource. And if you can get your hands on a copy, I have it. It's marked up, highlighted, sticky-noted. And I use it for just a great reference for using social media in the library. So social media and Twitter in the libraries and in schools is kind of a two-pronged approach. The first thing you can do is really take control of your professional development. And you can also share your story. And at Fremont, I have been fortunate enough to be able to have two hashtags that we kind of developed. And I worked with another administrator, one who's going to be my principal this coming year. And I said, we really need to create a hashtag for our district. There are some great districts in Nebraska that use hashtags. And I think there's a lawnmower going outside. Yeah, there is. So if you hear that buzzing noise, that's one lawnmower going by. So we worked together to create a hashtag because we really wanted to start telling our story and start with that hashtag before people really knew who we were. And if you are on Twitter, you know that York Dukes has their hashtag. E.M. Wolves is Exeter Milligan. MPS Panthers, they do some great stuff and they tweet out great things about what's going on at Norfolk. So we kind of wanted to start that even before a lot of people were on Twitter at Fremont Public Schools or maybe using it in hopes that we would establish kind of that brand and that hashtag. And then it would it would take off from there. The FPS TTWT, that is kind of an internal hashtag. And I'm going to talk about hashtags in a little bit. But the FPS TTWT is a group of teachers that I get to work with through our curriculum department and our curriculum director, Darren Kelberlau, kind of put a group of people together who kind of work with technology and we're kind of talking about technology and sharing a lot of technology with the other teachers and our students. And so we kind of kind of hang together. And so if I'm using that hashtag, that's kind of a maybe a tech tool that I want to share with them. And the FPS Connect is more of a tag for sharing what our kids are doing and celebrating some of those victories. So the internal influence can start with professional development. And that's kind of a big thing right now. Professional development can be very expensive. It takes time. And you have to kind of balance the professional development time with teacher work time. And honestly, Twitter is such a great professional development tool. It's free. It's 24 hours a day. You can do it whenever wherever. So if it's possible to harness the power of Twitter and some of the resources that you can find on Twitter and kind of incorporate that into your professional development, it's just such a great way to enhance the PD in your district. And it's a great way for teachers to really find specific things that apply to them. It's not kind of a broad, well, this is an educational theory that's popular right now. You can take your third grade teachers and they can find third grade teachers on Twitter and they can talk about what they're doing and they can do that all over the world. They can share lessons. They can share resources. They can give each other advice and support each other. There is probably a group of people, a group of educators for every single person in a district. My very first year as a teacher, I was involved with a group, the New Teacher Chat. And that was, I think, hashtag NT Chat. And they did a chat about once a month and it was just first year teachers talking about what was happening and what was going on in their classrooms and some of their struggles. And it was K-12 teachers, lots of different content areas. But everybody kind of had the same struggles and kind of the same things that they wanted to talk about. And even I learned a ton. I mean, I always came away from that chat with a little bit of just a little piece of information that I could take with me and use that as well. Another great professional development tool is Zeit, which is a digital newspaper. And what's really cool about this is that you can find articles that are very specific to you. You sign up for your account and you kind of choose the categories that you are interested in or things that you want to learn more about. And then as you give each article a thumbs up or a thumbs down, it kind of uses an algorithm to tailor what you get sent to you based on what you like and what you don't like. So stuff you're not really interested in, you may not see again. Things that you do like, you'll get more of that. And you might come across articles and think, you know what? Okay, I know the teacher across the hall would just love this. And you can just quick email that link to that teacher and just share those ideas across your learning network. And that can be within your building. It can be within your district. It can be within your state. It can even be across the world. So this is kind of just a graphic of Zeit and what it looks like. And what happens is you just choose your article and the article on this is how to create videos in Google Drive. I pulled that article up. And if you notice the arrow with the up, thumbs up, thumbs down, if you like that article, you just tap that thumbs up and it will kind of automatically calculate, okay, you like these articles, we'll find more of these. If it's a thumbs down, they'll say, okay, we're going to throw out those components and you may not see that again. And that's a really handy, just kind of a cool way to get good stuff that is applicable to you. And then you can share it. And just by hitting that box with the arrow button, you can either email that link to another teacher or you can tweet it out. And if you notice here, I went ahead and I said hashtag FPS, TTWT, which is my group of people that I talked to at Fremont. And then the other hashtag is Nebraska Ed Chat. And I'm just going to do a shameless plug for that. Nebraska Ed Chat is a group of educators that started in Nebraska. And I was very honored to be included with Brandon and Shelley Moenkel and Laura Crowell and my husband Chris put that together. And we do a weekly chat on Wednesday nights and it's based on education, but we cover all kinds of things. We talk about books that inspire us. We talk about apps that everybody's using. We talk about education trends. We talk about, sometimes we talk about assessments, all kinds of stuff. But I have made such great connections using Twitter and Nebraska Ed Chat has been a really huge part of that. And it's just a great resource because you can always find something you can use. And we do archive that chat on a Wiki space and it's NebraskaEdChat.wikispaces.com. And we archive the chat weekly so if you can't participate in the chat or you are not able to catch it, you can go back and we do a PDF of all of the posts and all of those tweets that people put out. And you can go back and take a look at that. And we have probably as many people checking out the archive as we do maybe participating sometimes. So that's another great part of Twitter is this learning network of people that you develop and they're not necessarily people that you see every day. They might be people you only see at NIDA or maybe at a conference that you go to once a year, but you really are able to share and exchange ideas. So there's my Nebraska Ed chat shameless plug and when we are starting up on August 27th, so if you're on Twitter, watch that and just watch. And if you feel like jumping in, please do. We love to have new people all the time. So that is Zite and that's how you can share articles out to Twitter. And you will be surprised. You will share something out and people will retweet it. They'll pass it on to their people in their learning network and maybe ask you a question or you can just make a really great connection. The other part of the professional development that I use is I have created a digital newspaper of my own based on the hashtags that I use, FPS, TTWT and FPS Connect. And so my paper is set up to pull all of the tweets with that hashtag once a week and it dumps it into a really nice little digital newspaper and it shoots me an email. And then what I do with that is I send that out to a group of people at Fremont Public Schools and it's just there. They might not be on Twitter if that might not be something that works for them, but I want to share those resources with them in another way as well. So I shoot that out to them through an email and they can read it and they can delete it. It's up to them but it's in their inbox and it's there. And it's also kind of a nice way for me to kind of archive some things that I've tweeted that I might want to come back to. So I use paper Lee but Scoop It is another one that people use to create digital newspapers and so that's another byproduct of Twitter and that's kind of a cool resource as well. So we have professional development and then we have student resources and Twitter can be a really powerful resource for your students maybe more towards secondary level. When I was in K-12 I was based mainly in our 7-12 library so I did have a separate library account and when I left Lakeview I handed that account over to the wonderful library and that took my place so that she could keep it going and she was really gracious about wanting to do that because we already had kids following us we had things we were doing we did secret tweets which was really awesome I would send out a Tuesday tweet and if you came in and said you know this is what the secret tweet is you got a prize it might be piece of candy it might be a pencil it might be something but it was just you know something tacky some little tip maybe a digital citizenship thing but we had kind of a little following with that and then we did a digital book club we were reading some books and kids were tweeting about what they were reading and just kind of sharing ideas and that was so fun to watch that because we started that and not really sure where it was going to go and the kids kind of took it and ran with it and so that's just was kind of a cool thing and then the sustained reading I mean even when the digital book club kind of ended people were still sharing books with each other and that to me was a just a sign of a huge success that we were able to get kids reading and keep them reading so it isn't always about technology it's also another way to enhance getting kids to read another thing that I loved about using Twitter with my kids they knew I was on Twitter and if they got stuck at night doing some of their work they could tweet me and I could help them and I'm as I said kind of when we talked about Google apps for education in May I'm kind of a 24-7 kind of person if my kids are stuck and it's 7 o'clock at night they know they can email me they knew that they could tweet me and this young lady she tweeted she tweeted someone else actually first and said does anybody know the password and another student said duh tweet Lake View library and she'll give it to you so she tweeted me through our library account and I direct messaged her the password because we do keep those passwords private and then she got it and she was able to continue working on her paper and I think this was during part of their research project but that was at 6 o'clock at night but she was able to get what she needed and she could move on and she didn't get stuck and to me I mean anything to keep kids moving keep them learning keep them researching and keep that ball rolling I'm all for that so I was just so excited that she thought well let's do this I'll we'll tweet you and we'll get what we need and that was really fun and I'm just that's something I'm really honestly very proud of that my kids kind of took that resource and applied it to something that was useful to them so that's when we move to our external influences if you're going to use Twitter kind of as as a way to tell your story I know we've had tons of things happening in our state we've had tornadoes we've had hailstorms and something my husband said not very long ago that a lot of communities especially smaller communities the school is really the heart of what goes on in that community and people look to the school sometimes for guidance and they look to them for some resources and so Twitter is such a great way to get information out to people and one thing about it is that it comes to their phone they don't have to go check a website they don't have to call anybody they can just pull up their phone they can look at it and they can say oh this is what we're doing or oh we just they closed school at two thirty because of snow or you know I know that there were probably tweets all over the place when the tornado went through Pilger I mean those that community just pulled together and people came from all over and social media was part of the power of getting people together so it is a great way to share information to get information out to people and you might still use a paper newsletter you might still use a website but adding that social media component just gets your message out to more people and it comes right to them so I was just he said that one day and I just thought you know you're so right and Twitter can be such a great way to enhance having the school be the center of a community it's also something that you can use to model digital citizenship instead of saying we're not going to talk about social media let's use it and let's show kids how to do it and let's advocate for our school let's show our stakeholders what we're doing let's create that transparency and show that our staff and our teachers are constantly learning constantly being inspired and constantly wanting to learn more so that when we go to the community and say hey we need computers we need a bond issue we need some help we need some some volunteers they already know through Twitter that you are doing great stuff for kids every single day you're showing what you're doing you're showing whose you know sports scores awards state championships anything like that you're talking about your kids you're showing people what you're doing and people who are following you on Twitter will know these people are working hard for our kids and yeah we are willing to put some money into those resources because we know that it's going to the kids so that's another it's just a huge tool and the digital citizen citizenship piece is really important like I said earlier I'm always mindful of what I'm tweeting because I want to be able to put my Twitter feed up in front of my kids anytime so I'm very you know careful about the pictures that are on there what I say and I'm very honest with them I tell them you know I've been just smoking hot mad at somebody and wanted to just fire up a tweet and know that they'll see it and they'll know it's them and you know maybe not name a name and I really want to do that and I just have to think this is not a good choice this is not a good digital citizenship choice this is not part of my footprint that I want to be permanent and we talk about that and they're always kind of amazed that you know Mrs. S gets mad and she wants to you know say something snarky to somebody and they know that they've been in that situation and that you had to make a choice so it's it's a great great tool if you can put that up in front of kids it's not an imaginary person it's not you know just an example of somebody that they don't know it's you standing in front of them saying this is who I am and that's pretty powerful to kids so basically the gist of using Twitter is if you tell your story you can get your name out there you can say what you're doing and do it before someone else does because we all know there's a ton of negativity about education especially in the media and on social media but if you're out there saying this is what we're doing in our school this is what we're doing in our library these are the things that we have available when somebody comes through with a tweet that says you know something may be negative there will be more people who will say well you know I don't think we're going to believe that because we really know who these people are we know what this district stands for we know that they're all about kids or if it's a public library we know they're all about our community and they're going to maybe brush off that negative comment where if you're not out there and you're not telling your story and you're not a presence they can say what they want and you're you don't have a lot of recourse and this is one of the ways that I've told our story at Fremont we did an author Skype with a fabulous author Kimberly Griffith Little and she we did a I think we had three or four classes cycle through because we just started talking and we just kept talking and talking and talking and she has written books that we had in our library so they were able to in real time talk to her it wasn't a video it was an actual conversation and the kids got to ask questions and we did that with two different authors this past school year and it was so exciting to see them ask these questions and they were such great questions like you know what book do you which book have you written that you like the least just you know and I was so proud of them and I was so amazed at how they just really connected with with her and then just devoured her books and so that's just a great way to get kids talking about books and reading books and a lot of authors will Skype for free it costs a lot to have an author come to your school but a lot of authors will talk to you for maybe a half hour at no charge so that's definitely something that you might want to look into the other thing that I love to do is I love to take pictures of what my kids are doing the one with the comic we were working on we were learning about comics and so we kind of incorporated some of our dewey decimal knowledge into those comics and for some reason everybody picked the alien to be dewey decimal I don't know why that was but that was kind of the trend and I just loved some of the stuff they came up with so I tweeted quite a few of their comics for people to see but that kind of showed people in the community or people that were following maybe our FPS connect hashtag that we're doing some cool stuff and our kids are having fun and they're making some great connections so I'm going to talk just a little bit about hashtags and a hashtag is basically a topic it's kind of like switching channels on a television and that my very good friend Otis Pierce from ESU 7 came up with that analogy it's basically a topic and you can create any topic you want you can see there's gratitude there's Nebraska Ed Chat there's Ed Chat FPS connect Viking Tech was one that we used at Lakeview so you can create a tweet you can send a message and then you put that hashtag on there and it kind of just qualifies the tweet with that topic it says this is kind of what this tweet is about and if people search for example Nebraska Ed Chat they will see all the tweets that people have sent out using that hashtag and they can kind of see what that conversation looks like so a hashtag is is pretty important and you can see this is kind of a screenshot of my tweet deck feed and I have a column with FPS TTWT so I can kind of see keep track of stuff that we're talking about within that group of people and then our district FPS connect and we can just kind of share some of that stuff and I like to kind of keep track because now other people in our district are using FPS connect so if I see something from another person I can retweet that and share that with my network as well so one thing about hashtags though before you even think about using Twitter with your school or your public library you definitely want to check with the bosses and make sure that they're okay with you using Twitter as a tool when I came to Fremont I checked with our curriculum director and he asked a few other people and they kind of came back and gave me some parameters and said you know no faces no names which with kids I definitely do that I don't show faces I don't show names there's times when I really truly want to because the look on their faces is so priceless and I'm so proud of them but ultimately we want to protect them and protect their privacy so I usually end up showing the back of their head and not naming names but eventually you know if they're looking or we show that Twitter feed up on the screen they'll know it you know the kids know who they are but out in the actual globally speaking on Twitter they're not identifiable so that's something that you definitely want to be mindful of does your district have a social media policy if they do you need to know what it is and make sure you're abiding by that and then who owns the account are you going to manage that is it your personal account are you going to have a district account those are some things that you definitely need to take into consideration when you are using Twitter for your district and if you create a hashtag for your district the best way to do that is to decide what you want to use and search it over several days and that's kind of what we did with our FPS connect hashtag but this spring after Nita we were kind of talking about just gratitude and being joyful and thinking about what's a great hashtag we can use to kind of celebrate some cool stuff that we want to you know just be grateful for and joy ed was brought up and so we thought well okay well I'll I'll use that I'll start using that and I didn't search it I didn't really research it and after about a week or so I did a search just to kind of see if anybody else was using it and found out that joy ed was not necessarily educational so then I had to go back and change my hashtag to joy ed you so don't make that mistake definitely search that hashtag and then make sure that it doesn't mean something other than what you were intending and then once you create that hashtag use it or lose it because if you're not using it trust me someone else will grab it and you'll have to start all over again and I always get questions when I talk about Twitter just basic things about Twitter and since I can't see any of you or talk to any of you cyber a man is a fabulous gentleman he's on Twitter he's on the web but he put together this really nice Twitter 101 webpage as part of his website and it's just a super super great resource for getting started with Twitter how to do a chat what are some of the chats that are out there who are some great people to follow so this is a link to this page and that will be on the end compass site as well as on my blog and you can check that out but he's a great place to start and get some great information and if you still have trouble you are always welcome to email me or to tweet me and I will definitely help you get started so kind of in closing basically you just want to let everything let everyone know the great things you're doing for kids every day so that people know who you are they know what you're doing you've got that information out there so that when you need something from your stakeholders they know that money is going to go to kids those resources are going to go to kids you're doing things for kids you're doing things for the community and they won't think twice about helping you if you don't kind of put that deposit into that bank account you don't have any support to withdraw from when you need some help and any questions that you have for me Cynthia that was great wonderful and I forgot to mention to everyone that you know we will happily take your questions there is a questions area in the go-to-webinar interface you can type them in there or if you have a microphone we are more than happy to turn on your microphone and hear your dulcet tones and will instead of typing so if you have questions just go ahead and do that just type into the questions unmute me and I will happily turn on your microphone for you we've already gotten a couple of questions that have come in I've got a couple of myself and first I'm going to say I I literally laughed out loud when you mentioned the question for the author about which book do you of yours do you like the least I have I have literally attended hundreds of author talks and Q&As over the years and I have always heard the question you know which one's your favorite but I've never had anybody an adult anyways ask an author which book of yours do you like the least and I just love that question now I love and I was so proud of them you know they wrote their little questions down on a piece of paper and I kind of previewed it and you know because we hadn't done this before but you know I kind of got to a point where they just whispered it in my ear and then they walked up to the screen and they introduced themselves and they asked their question and and I was just floored I mean they were asking some deep questions and and both authors were just you know so gracious about you know and one lady she's just like man wow I don't you know I'm not going to tell you which one I hate but I have one that I truly truly hate so she kind of kind of in a sneaky way was like okay read them all and see if you can figure out which one I really hate but you know like I said before when I was here visiting with you guys the kids are always the star and I was so proud of them they just you know they just I love it when they feel like they can ask a great question and and just you know they just felt like they were so cool that they got to talk to this lady that has a book on her shelf so that was such a cool experience I was so proud of them and so excited we got to share that great um so we do have one question from staff and I'll preface this with I was keeping track of all the sites and services that Cynthia was mentioning so we'll be putting links to all that in the show notes but you talked about Zeit and is it can you be a little more can you provide a little more about like how do you get it is in the app is it a web service what what where where do you go about getting that yes that is such a great question because I did kind of gloss over that part Zeit is an app and you can get it on your phone on your tablet it is free and basically you just download that app open it up you can use it without creating an account but it doesn't necessarily track what you like and what you don't like so you know I'm not always an advocate of yep download it and create an account but this one definitely you want to create yourself an account and it will give you the chance to choose some categories that you're interested in and you can definitely tailor that to your personal and your professional taste because I look at education I look at technology but I also love photography so I have articles that are coming to me about photography and tools and different resources that are out there so you can make it you know very very tailored to what you are interested in and then like I said as you read your articles and you're giving them a thumbs up or a thumbs down just by tapping those two little icons their whack-a-doodle algorithm will I love the word whack-a-doodle but there I don't know how it works just works but their algorithm will start to really tailor what you receive when you open up that app and you'll start getting things that are very very specific to what you want and then things that you're not interested in you will not see those probably again so it's it's free it's an app and it is just a super resource and I love that you can send articles through Twitter you connect it to your Twitter account and I'm not always a big advocate of connecting apps to apps to apps but in this case this is one that I definitely recommend you do want to connect that to your Twitter account and then you can tweet out an article to a group of people or just to anybody or to a friend maybe that you don't have their email address you can also send it to the to your email I've sent things to myself that I have been using for a blog post or for a presentation or you can also it will connect automatically to your evernote account if you are an evernote user you can connect that to your evernote account and then you can drop it into evernote into a specific notebook or folder and but that is a great question I'm so glad you asked that because it's a super super awesome resource and somebody did ask in the chat the URL for this is zeit.com Z-I-T-E at least that's where I found it so it is and it that just kind of gives you some information about site but it is an app so you have to go to either the App Store or Google Play or wherever you get your apps and search it there and download it from that you it's not a web-based resource and Mary Jo on our staff here had a follow-up that she wants to do by microphone hi thanks can you hear me yep I can hello perfect hi it's Mary Jo hey I just was thinking and I hadn't thought of this before but if you're brand new to Twitter this might be a good way to get started you could load the app you could see what's going on you could you know get yourself logged in and everything not creating hashtags or anything right off the bat but just start lurking and watching and seeing what's going on that interests you it that's interesting area do you think that's a good way to get started I thought of it or no absolutely because when you first sign up for Twitter it's gonna say you need to you know I think you need to find maybe I don't know six or 12 people to follow and you know definitely if you were stuck there's some great people I could recommend to follow in fact I might throw those on a slide before I resend the link to Michael when before he posts that and I'll put some people on there you can follow on Twitter but the best way you are absolutely right to start using Twitter is just to create your account and just kind of follow some people and see what's going on and see what you're interested in and there goes that one more again we're not hearing it thank you I'm so glad because I can totally hear it but you can just get on there and absolutely see who's see what people are saying it's what you make it if you're following you know pop stars and and rock stars and you know celebrities you're going to get all that and maybe that won't be as meaningful to you but if you're following some educators and trust me there are some heavy hitters in education that use Twitter a lot you will get some great resources and you don't have to talk to anybody until you're ready and then maybe just start by hitting that retweet button and just retweet something you think is cool and then maybe get a little braver and decide one night on Wednesday night you maybe want to just kind of watch that Nebraska Ed chat and see you know what people are saying about that and then maybe next time you might introduce yourself on a chat and if you do Nebraska Ed chat we always have greater and we have a greeter because we just feel like it takes a lot of courage to jump into a chat with a bunch of people you don't know so we always have a greeter to welcome you to the chat and thank you for coming and if you have any questions you've got kind of some go-to people that you can ask those questions to because it's not second nature to everybody to be techie or to be Twitter oriented so you know but the more people we have in our network and the more people you create and make connections with the more rich of an experience it is so absolutely if you just download the app create your account follow some people see what they say and trust me you'll catch on quickly and it'll go from there and you will have some really great resources so absolutely I would do that great another question from the audience Linda is asking is there a charge for using Twitter like for text messages just data if you're using your phone it would just be data not a lot of data usage if you're using it on a smartphone if you're using it on your tablet it's just you know connected to Wi-Fi so I am on Twitter quite a bit and and I don't use a lot of data we're sharing data this is new in our family and trust me I'm using the least amount of data but I am Chris and I are probably the heaviest Twitter users and we're not using hardly any yeah our two teeny are using quite a bit yeah there I this is almost taking me back I used a little service to look up how long I've been on Twitter and it turns out a guy I think I signed up for Twitter about the first week I got this job it was about seven years and four months ago and originally and I think you still can do Twitter purely via text message via SMS without using an app and and if you are paying for text messaging that those charges would apply but I got to be honest with with the advent of smartphones I'm not sure really many people do that anymore I did not know that oh yeah oh see that was before apps yeah I didn't know I remember signing up for Twitter probably oh my goodness I bet I signed up for it and kind of forgot about it which a lot of people do and then probably about three years ago Chris and I both kind of got involved in it and but I bet I have had my account probably for five or six years but those first three years it just kind of sat there and I didn't do anything with it and and now it's almost second nature so but no I didn't know that you could do it through text messaging but again you're right through the smartphones it really is probably the best way to kind of manage your account and and what you're looking at so right so Linda Linda again is asking and and I'm guessing Linda you are new to Twitter and that's good you're in the right place she says so you do you need to download a Twitter app do you have to use an app I would I would okay but you can use it as a website too you can go to twitter.com yes absolutely and you know depending on how you end up using it there there's the Twitter app which I would definitely start with but if you are first signing up my recommendation honestly would be to go to your computer and sign up through the website because you're able to go into your settings and you're you can really set your privacy settings you can decide can people just follow you or do they have to ask your permission and when you're you know first starting it's it's the tendency is maybe to lock it down a little bit tighter just to kind of get comfortable and sometimes the app makes it a little more difficult to adjust those things so I I usually recommend to people if you're going to first start out use your computer go to twitter.com create your account there because you can really see everything you can upload maybe a profile picture a little easier and then download the app to whatever mobile device that you're using and sign in with your account that you created and then you can see everything but that's that's kind of the order that I would recommend that you do that starting with twitter.com there are apps out there that are Twitter management apps that you can use and once you get a little further into it you can experiment with some of those Hootsuite is an app that I have used my husband uses tweetbot and if you use a computer if you notice that slide I had that was showing the hashtags on my computer I use tweet deck because it allows me to manage multiple categories and multiple hashtags at the same time and that's probably more Twitter 201 than Twitter 101. Start with twitter.com set yourself up then download your app and log in and that is a great place to start. Right George I'll just say you know if you if you don't have a smartphone you don't have to get one to use Twitter there there are way you can use you know the website you can do text messaging if you want to although I don't recommend it there are many ways to do it I mean that used to that was originally the only way to do it was by text message so there you go. Okay so here's a question too that I had which you kind of mentioned policies and so maybe we can kind of go go down that rabbit hole for a minute or two. How do you handle following or friending students to that you know I obviously you're very cognizant of what you're posting in the first place and you're obviously interacting but if you know they they need their own account to be able to follow you do you follow them back direct messaging which is not public how do you deal with those sorts of issues. That is such you guys ask such great questions. That is a great question when I my personal account and this is this is this is me this is my policy in terms of what I'm comfortable with not everyone is maybe as black and white about it as I am but my personal account which is the only account I use now I do not allow my students to follow me if they do try to follow me I I do block them and they know that when we first talk about social media and we talk about Twitter I tell them don't follow me I will block you because I'm that's a policy of my that is my policy that's something that that I've decided for myself. Honestly they will go and look at my Twitter feed because it is public and they'll say you're not that interesting anyway. So that kind of care of itself. But some educators you know they do follow their students on social media and that's that's their choice I do not when I had a library account I directed kids if they thought they were going to follow me I directed them to that account and then that my account I actually did not follow kids back I could have I could tweet back and forth to them and they could send me messages privately and I could send them messages privately but I did not follow any students using that library account and that was just kind of a decision that I made some library accounts some school accounts you know they follow you know each other and other schools and all kinds of stuff and that's really just a matter of what you're comfortable with and kind of you know where you want to go with it if your school has a social media policy then you really need to know what what their parameters are for following students and how accounts are used in my case when I came to Fremont from Lakeview they kind of already knew who I was and and how deep I was into Twitter and so they were very gracious about saying yeah we would you know you're fine to continue tweeting about the kids and stuff we're doing but you know this is what we we want you to do so the first thing you really want to do is check to see is there a social media policy at your public library in your board policy if you're in a school check with your curriculum director check if your tech people and just kind of see what's in print and what you're kind of you need to be mindful of but that choice to not follow students was was my personal choice and like I said they didn't find me interesting so it kind of just took care of itself so so Linda is asking so so people can see your tweets without following you yes they can if you set up your account in in such a way and that's why I recommend going to twitter.com to do that because you can say okay you can't see me unless I give you permission to follow me you can set yourself up that way or you can set your account that anybody can see anything that you say whether they follow you or not and I think I might have had mind locked down a little tighter and then maybe as I went and got more comfortable I opened it up so that people maybe who didn't follow me but maybe followed a hashtag that I used could kind of see what I was saying and if they choose to follow me that's great and if they don't that's fine too and that's just kind of what you're comfortable with but yes if you set your account up to be public people can see what you tweet without having to follow you just and see if it's correct correct me if I'm wrong on this one with with something like Facebook you do have a certain level of granular control over this particular post can only be seen by my friends or this particular post can is public whereas Twitter it's pretty much your account is either public or not I think so it's been a while since I've looked at them but it's I do know that the Twitter policy and privacy settings are probably not as complicated as Facebook right I get really confused when I start looking at at Facebook and Twitter it's a little more a little more simple right and you can the decisions you're making you're you're pretty sure what people are seeing and what they're not and if you're not sure log out and search yourself and see you can find yourself then you'll know yeti in our audience says if you post something on Twitter pretty much expect anyone can see it it always make that assumption yes that's that's probably just good advice period on any absolutely and Linda asks one more us so is there a difference between following a hashtag and following a person a yes following a person following a person you are once you click that follow button under their profile everything they say will show up in your feed when you open it up and and kind of look to see what people are talking about you will always see that persons tweets if you follow a hashtag you can go into the search and you can search a hashtag and it will pull up all of those tweets it's not something you can actually follow and have it always show up which is kind of now getting us into the tweet deck area where if you're on the computer you can set up a column that that will automatically collect all those hashtags so a hashtag is a little different than following a person but if you are on twitter.com and you search a hashtag you can save that search and then go back and you can always just easily pull that back up without having to retype it but there is a difference and once you get to the point where you're following certain hashtags you kind of end up having to move into maybe another management app to keep track of all that. It does too at a certain point once you're comfortable with Twitter kind of as it is yeah getting into the tools is where it really comes down to I used most of us around here do use tweet deck also and so you can set it up but then it and say okay so show me this conversation in this column things like that but yeah I think we have done in the past some general how to use Twitter shows you might want to anybody interested go back through our archive this point they might be time to do another one is they might be outdated at this point but they are out there but yeah get yourself signed up and and acclimate yourself first before you really start getting into the tools I'll completely agree with that and you can just follow I know at least one staff member here just kind of follows other state institutions isn't interested in lots of conversation just wants to know what what's being announced by other government agencies here and and it's a great it can for her is just a resource and and she finds stuff that way and and that works too so it is really what you make it you can be as as deep into it as you choose to be and if you're you're frustrated and you don't feel like you're getting a lot out of it it might be who you're following or it just might be you know and I have met people that Twitter just doesn't do it for them that is absolutely fine I went to the Google Summit in Iowa this summer and I've been struggling with a way to convey to people how amazing you know Twitter is for you know professional development and finding great resources and just inspiring yourself I mean every one of us knows what it's like to come home and feel like the life has just been sucked right out of you and I can go to Twitter and I have you know people I follow that always seem to inspire me and kind of refill that well and Eric Sheininger was at Google Summit and he said in the middle of his presentation you know some people don't get Twitter they don't understand it they don't find it useful but really it is such a great resource why would you close the door on it you just need to try it and and that really kind of hit home with me because it's free it's 24 7 I wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning and can't get back to sleep I'm on Twitter you know I have friends that tweet me and go really you were up at 3 o'clock nice but that's you know that might be the only time that I am still sitting still and long enough to actually read something so it's whatever fits your life it it just it just works and why would you not open the door and let some of that stuff in yeah and Bobby in our audience says I'm that way with Facebook Twitter not so much and yeah everybody needs to find you know that you and and to a certain extent I would say too it's you know the the if if the people you need to follow as your family and your family's all on on Facebook that and they're not on Twitter then you know that's that's where you go and and so to to each their platform and you don't have to be on all of them and you use the ones that fit with your needs in your situation so exactly exactly all right so we are just over our hour here I want to thank you once again this was was wonderful I think it was a great kind of little case study is is how Twitter can be used in schools and got some folks's questions answered there about how Twitter works on itself so thanks again it was wonderful have you on the show again and I'm glad we could catch you before school started because I know you get quite busy once that happens and we're getting a lot of thank yous for the audience so just for a moment here I'm going to take back control and just say thanks to everyone for attending this week's session and this is not the page I wanted to be on so there we go give me one second here and you can join us next week where we have another school we have a the SVYA LIT project using adult literature to talk to teens about sexual violence and consent we have a romance book talks coming up and then on August 20th what you need to know to apply for a youth grant so we got a couple of different topics coming up there you can follow us here on the Encompass Live website or we do have we are on Facebook we do also post on Twitter we just don't have a specific Encompass Live Twitter account but the Commission has that or you can follow us on Facebook to get news about upcoming events and things like that this show has been recorded so thank you all for attending and we'll see you next week on Encompass Live