Monday, August 24, 2009

Results from Twitter goals survey

I am preparing an introductory Twitter presentation and am using information from a blog post by Charlene Kingston dealing with setting goals for your own use of Twitter.

I asked my Twitter PLN to answer a short survey on this topic. I sent the tweet out to my 4625 followers, and some of my followers re-tweeted the request to 4019 of their followers (who may or may not overlap with my followers.) I received 196 responses, many in the first few hours of posting the request on Twitter.

The yes/no questions were as follows:
  1. I am a K-16 educator or pre-service educator.
  2. I use Twitter to talk to friends and family
  3. I use Twitter to find business customers.
  4. I use Twitter to form a professional network
  5. I use Twitter to send out and share information.
  6. I use Twitter to receive information.
  7. I have more than one Twitter account so I can keep my personal and professional tweets separate.
Results:

7% of the respondents were not K-16 educators
93% of the respondents were K-16 educators

8% of the non-K16 educators had separate Twitter accounts for personal and professional use.
24% of the K16 educators had separate Twitter accounts for personal and professional use

The goals for the use of Twitter by the non-K16 educators are illustrated in the graph below.




The goals for the use of Twitter by the K-16 educators are illustrated in the graph below.




The graphs were created using the NCES Create-A- Graph site.

A big thank-you to all who responded!

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Wordle

Blog URL: http://kathyschrock.net/blog/


I decided to run a Wordle query on this blog to get a sense for what I am really writing about. If you have never tried Wordle, the site defines Wordle as "a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text."

I feel it is much more than a toy. Imagine students running Wordle queries on blogs they follow to see the author's most written about topics? Or creating a Wordle from the text in their own essay to see what topics they cover in depth?

Tom Barrett has a great slide show with many suggestions for using Wordle in the classroom.

The Wordle from this blog is below. It provides me with useful information and reminds me that I should probably branch out a bit in my areas of discussion!



Give Wordle a try for yourself!