Last year I used to tweet out an Ed Tech "Cartoon of the Day" each morning. Although this sounds like a daunting task of tweeting every morning, it was made quite a bit easier by using TweetDeck. Many people who use Twitter are already familiar with this service as it is "the" de facto tool for getting the most out of Twitter. Once of the cool features in Tweetdeck is the ability to schedule tweets. This is basically planning to send tweets out ahead of time and you don't even need to be logged in for it to happen.

So, for  Cartoon of the Day I would spent some time on a weekend creating a few week's worth of cartoon tweets and scheduling them for one per day. In this process I gathered a pretty extensive collection of Education and Ed Tech cartoons. 

I took a break during the summer and haven't got back into the swing of things. After writing this blog post I will start up this project again.

But before I begin I wanted to share a PowerPoint slideshow here with some 60+ of my favorite cartoons. Below is a link to this file on Dropbox where you can download it you wish. The slideshow is set up to run each slide for 7 seconds and to loop continously. I use this either at the beginning or right after lunch of a training session as people are coming in and getting ready. Feel free to use this as well anyway you see fit. 

Oh... and please shoot me back and cartoons you find as well - always looking for new ones!

My district is going down the road of creating our "Digital Citizenship" path and I am tasked with helping create this plan. I've found a ton of resources out there but wanted to quickly share two that I am finding quite helpful.

One is a recent episode from the Goin' Digital podcast with Greg Goins. Here's the summary:

"In this episode, Mike Ribble and Susan M. Bearden, two of the leading experts on Digital Citizenship, share ideas on how to implement digital citizenship lesson plans across the K-12 curriculum. Both respected speakers and authors on this topic, Ribble and Bearden provide resources and powerful insight as to how schools can better prepare a new generation of digital natives through teachable moments and personal responsibility." 

You can download the podcast using any podcast tool on your phone or listen directly here

The second is this list from Mashable. Now the article that is a few years old, but these tips still apply.  I created a graphic to along with the list.

Shout out to Eva Buyuksimkesyan from whom I first saw this on her blog post titled "Twitter Bios for Book Characters".  She wrote about how students can take part in this activity in which they create Twitter accounts. 

I thought I would take this idea and make a template that teachers and students could use to digitally create their own Twitter profiles.  This template was created in Google Drawing so that it is easy for users to make their own copies. I have seen this done for quite some time with services like FakeBook, which allows students to create fake Facebook accounts of characters.  This Twitter template though is not a service so students will need to know a little on how to use Google Drawing. 

Here are the TWO reasons why I really like this lesson idea:

1) It has the students do research / introspection for their character/person. They will need to think as if they were this person to either summarize their achievements or highlight their characteristics. They will also need to know about others who were connected to them in some way. For example if I was do assigned Atticus Finch from "To Kill A Mockinbird" I would have to know about his relationship with three individuals such as Scout, Boo Radley, and Tom Robinson. 

2) This teaches students how to use and manipulate the tools found in Google ​Drawing. These skills are the same for other programs like Docs and Slides. Students will become more proficient with all these and find themselves using techniques like Crop, Layering, Shape Tools, etc for years to come. 

Blue Nod

This is a spatial visualization of all the people you are connected with

Twipho

This is a search tool that only brings back images based on a hashtag or person

Tweet Tails

Type in any name (not just yours) and get both statistics and a Word Cloud of the most used words in those tweets

TweetBeam

A image wall of people and tweets that rotates images to the top based on a hashtag

Visual.ly/twitter

epic Tweet battle between myself and Coach Ben

​Here is the complete list of analysis between Ben and myself

Visible Tweets

Gorgeous animated wall that rotates tweets based on a common hashtag or person.