Are you tweeting during the school day??

Short answer: no, of course not.

But the reality is much of the world is active and engaging on twitter during the school day, so how do you (as a teacher) take advantage of what Twitter has to offer without compromising professionally?

A few things that have been useful for me:

1. Use Flipboard to keep track of Twitter users you follow and hashtags

Flipboard is a great app for iOS or Android which acts as equal parts RSS feed reader and social media cultivator. When you get home you can easily flip through the day's top tweets from those you follow (as ranked by retweets and your engagement with those users). This way you won't miss out on that new resource from #sschat or #edtech, and at the same time you don't need to use up some of your prep scrolling through to find something useful.

Hashtags especially can be a huge resource for lessons, links, best practices - you name it. A few I recommend: #sschat, #wrldchat, #edtech. Flip board does a nice job of displaying things graphically so you don't get into the mind-numbing scrolling rut. (Feel free to share other useful hashtags in the comments)

2. Use Buffer to stay engaged even when you can't.

Ruining the magic here, I rarely tweet during the week. Almost all of the link sharing I do on Twitter is done via reading on Feedly/Flipboard and scheduling with the awesome free app Buffer. I do most of my reading (no surprises here) when I have time on the weekends or before I head into school each day from 6-7am.

Installing the app in my browser allows me to easily peg something to be shared on an automatic schedule when I know more of my followers will be online.

3. Use Followerwonk to schedule Buffer posts at the perfect times

Speaking of which - Followerwonk is a neat app which analyzes your followers and predicts the best times to share based on their activity.   This takes a bit of the guess work out of deciding when to post.

4. Use IFTTT to automatically Tweet and Buffer posts from your blog

If This Then That is an extremely simple online optimization tool that allows you to make if-then statements for basically anything online. So for example, I have two IFTTT "recipes" as they call them for when I post a new entry to this blog. The first posts a link to Twitter immediately saying: "New post: " and the second Buffers a link for later in that day or the next day with the prefix: "ICYMI: " (In case you missed it, for the uninitiated).

This is certainly not an end-all-be-all list of social media tips, but they have helped for me!

Fellow teachers - you have any tips to share? Best ways to engage in social media? Share 'em in the comments or feel free to tweet at me @mmccabe.

A primer on Chicago politics?

I'm currently reading American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J Daley - his battle for Chicago and the nation by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor right now and it is absolutely incredible.

I am only 280 pages in (a few months into Daley's second term), and already well-worth the purchase.

I've pulled out a few quotes that I think are interesting or thought provoking (and will continue to do so) here.  A few of the most interesting:

“Look at the Lord’s Disciples,” Daley would later say in response to a charge of corruption in City Hall. “One denied Him, one doubted Him, one betrayed Him. If our Lord couldn’t have perfection, how are you going to have it in city government?”

In April 1917, the Chicago Real Estate Board met and — concerned about what officials described as the “invasion of white residence districts by the Negroes” — appointed a Special Committee on Negro Housing to make recommendations. On this committee’s recommendation, the board adopted a policy of block-by-block racial segregation, carefully controlled so that “each block shall be filled solidly and . . . further expansion shall be confined to contiguous blocks.” Three years later, the board took the further step of voting unanimously to punish by “immediate expulsion” any member...

“Make no little plans,” Burnham, a prominent architect and principal designer of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, advised. “They have no magic to stir men’s blood.”

Anyone else already read this? Anyone else currently reading?