 Welcome to K-12 online conference 2015 and my presentation on what can social media aggregation contribute to advocating for education. This is Dr. Thomas Hull back home again in Indiana. For those of you who've known me for a while, you may not have realized that I ever left Indiana, but I did in 2010 something I should never have done and returned again in 2014 so that my daughter could attend Purdue, my alma mater. To know more about me, check out my homepage at DrThomasHull.com where I tell my story just as I'm going to encourage you to tell your story, which I especially like doing with Twitter, which you can see here. I've been doing for quite some time and if you check out my profile at DrThomasHull, you'll see that I've had quite a bit to say. And especially if you want to know what I've been up to for the last year since I've been back home again in Indiana, check out this page. Now I want to be very clear that this is not a presentation about technology. It's much more about education than it is about technology. But of course I will share some technical tools that one can use in order to help us to do as I'm advocating the better job of telling our story. Just as Dr. Scott McLeod did late last year in which he encouraged us at tech conferences to not just talk about technology and to make sure that we emphasize education, which is what I'm going to do. But let me tell you how I came about to do this. The story begins back in 2009 when during the aftermath of the Iranian presidential election, I noticed the students in Tehran using Twitter. And of course so did a lot of other people which generated the meme does Tiananmen plus web equal Tehran. This is a story from the Washington Post written by Jose Antonio Vargas in June of 2009 which begins with an anecdote from 20 years before in 1989 during the Tiananmen Square uprising which I also followed very carefully as best I could back in 1989. So of course I was as much fascinated by what was going on Tehran. And of course 20 years hence I had some other tools besides my transistor radio to find out what was going on. And that's what this article is all about. But enough said about how came to be here. I wanted to make clear just as I said that I want to emphasize education above technology. And I call this getting all A's in school. The A's are assessment, accountability and advocacy. And you can read a post that I wrote back about four years ago in which I encouraged others to do that as well. Why should we care so much about assessment, accountability and advocacy? Well the reason is because we want to be transparent. We want to be transparent about what our students are learning. We ought to be transparent about how our teachers are growing professionally. So that we can harness those stories of student learning and teachers professional learning to do a better job of telling the story of our schools, our staff and our students in order to advocate on behalf of our school, our programs and all the other educational topics about which we are so passionate. As far as student accountability is concerned that can very easily be demonstrated in a number of ways. For example, as students learn they generate learning artifacts which are evidence of learning. The papers they write, the projects they do. For example, accreditation in engineering and technology which I taught in my previous career in higher education is based very much on collecting learning artifacts in order for us to be able to demonstrate that our students are learning what we claim they are learning. Now those learning artifacts especially if they are collected digitally can certainly provide very positive digital identities for our students as evidence of their digital citizenship which they can then compile into electronic portfolios. Along with the digital badges they might collect as further evidence of learning in order for our students to be accountable for their learning. By the same token we need to encourage our teachers in their professional learning to have personal learning networks so that not only can they learn from others but that they can also share what they are learning with others. And in so doing produce complementary evidence of their professional achievement beyond merely the evidence of their students' performance through those dreaded test scores in order for them to be evaluated and compensated in a way that reflects their true contribution. And if we do all this then of course we've got the means to tell our story better so that in light of all the public policy issues in which education is embroiled these days school choice, teacher evaluation, high stakes testing and parent trigger for example we'll have stories to tell in order to tell folks why they ought to choose our school rather than some other school or why our teachers are better than others and so then we don't have to fear high stakes testing and parent trigger. But of course this can be easier said than done especially if one is working in an environment that just doesn't get it because of course administrative leaders especially hate to give up control and they want to control the message but we've got to be willing to give up some control because the message is told so much better from the ground up by the teachers and the students who are engaged in learning. So that teachers for example who have personal learning networks can demonstrate that not only are they growing professionally but also that they are sharing with others what they're learning as will our students who if indeed they learn how to harness social media in order to be good digital citizens we can assess their learning through for example the conversations they have with subject matter experts or other learning activities in which they're engaged which can be captured through social media. So what social media and web 2.0 tools might be harness in that regard. Well here are a few examples certainly Twitter as I think I've demonstrated over the 8 plus years in which I've been using Twitter. I've used it not only to learn so much from so many of you but I hope also I've used it to share with you what I have learned. I'm also a big fan of social bookmarking and Digo is my tool of choice for social bookmarking. If you check out my Digo stream again you will see ample evidence not only of my professional learning but when I was teaching especially in higher ed all my students used Digo in order to demonstrate their learning and then of course blogging. I've been blogging a few years now not as often as I would like and those of our students who have started blogging here at our school are so fortunate because of course they're learning how to do that so much sooner than I did but especially when I was doing it about six years ago what I was then doing was just beginning to experiment with what I'm now advocating. Namely I was encouraging my students to use social media in order to provide evidence of their learning and back then in social media we called it a life stream and each of my students had a life stream which they generated and which was the evidence that I sought to have them demonstrate their learning and of course those life streams I've now begun to call current streams and by a learning stream what I mean is an aggregation of the social media streams first of all of our students and of our staff which then can be corporately aggregated to generate a learning stream for example for our school to do a better job of telling the story of our school and therefore then advocating for our school and for education in general. I'm now finally going to show you some examples of how one can do that but let me start first of all with a story of how we used to do that with a service called Friend Feed which no longer exists and has since been shut down by Facebook who bought it somewhere along the way but my favorite is Rebel Mouse which I'll show you and then a couple other favorites and I'm also beginning some experiments with IFTTT if then then that and I hope to share those with you in a subsequent presentation but as I said we used to call it a life stream and here's a post from back in 2009 in the life stream blog in which we were recognized for using life streams in learning and therefore producing learned streams and of course here's an example of a learned stream that we generate here at Traders Point Christian Academy using Rebel Mouse which we're currently using in order to aggregate Twitter feeds especially Twitter feeds using a hashtag this year's hashtag is you belong at TPCA last year's hashtag was TPCA love one another and so anyone who tweets with those hashtags then gets aggregated into our Rebel Mouse which we feature on our site at TPCS.org that's for Traders Point Christian Schools and then also is featured on our Facebook page at facebook.com slash Traders Point CA if you go click on more and then click on Twitter then you will see our Rebel Mouse on our Facebook page another tool that we harness to tell our story has an app name namely Storify and here's an example of a Storify story that we used to tell about one of the recent visits to our school by Indiana's First Lady Mrs. Karen Pence who comes quite often and is coming again very soon and what we have done here with Storify is to aggregate photos tweets and other social media content into a Storify to tell the story of that particular visit also another tool that we use for telling our story is Smoor now Smoor makes it very easy to produce very attractive newsletters which we use to keep our parents and their families up to date on what's going on at TPCA so here are some examples of tools that we use to tell our story in order to get all A's in school all A's to assess student learning to be accountable as teaching professionals and to advocate for education to tell our story so how are you going to tell your story? it's actually not very hard to do it but you've got to do it and encourage you to do so thank you for listening I hope to hear from you especially to hear how you're telling your story so reach out to me especially via Twitter at Dr. Thomas Hull