What is Twitter and Why is it Becoming So Popular? Part 1

Greetings,

Hope you are having a great weekend. The big question of the week was, what is twitter and why is it becoming so popular?  Recently in the Dallas/Fort Worth area there were two Pre-Super Bowl 45 parties with Dallas Cowboy Wide Receivers Miles Austin and Dez Bryant for about 400 lucky fans. Remember these two events were free to the public!

These events included free food and refreshments while watching the NFC Football Championship game and a chance to win Super Bowl 45 tickets valued at $1,200 or more. If you were paying attention to their tweets or messages on their twitter page, they listed where and when these events took place. Listed below was Dez Bryant’s messages or tweets, telling fans the time and location of his event.

Twitter is a web site that allows you to communicate and connect with others in real time.  Twitter is also becoming a popular social networking site. When a person goes on the twitter home page, they can look for others who have twitter pages and read their tweets.  A tweet is a message that is limited by 140 characters and you can send  messages to almost anyone that has a twitter account. 

If you sign up for a free account, then you too can tweet on other people's twitter pages. You can also add your own videos and picture links to your twitter page. To learn more about twitter please click on the picture below and it will take you to a video that will go into greater detail on twitter.

I hope you enjoyed the blog on twitter.  One thing you want to remember is people tweet almost about anything.  No one is regulating or making sure that appropriate information is being posted.  You want to make sure you stay safe if you create a twitter account, and never tweet out any personal information about you or your school, your address or phone number.  For more information on twitter, please visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter  We will see you next Week.  Take care.

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What is Cool Timer?

Greetings,

Hopefully you had a great Fourth of July spending time with family and friends. This week I am sharing with you a timer you can download to use as a stopwatch or a count down timer with your students. All you need to do is visit the following site to download it for free: www.harmonyhollow.net/cool_timer.shtml

Once you download it you will not need an internet connection to run the program. Here is a screen shot of what it looks like, once you have downloaded it.

Your students will enjoy watching the countdown timer when they are in working in small groups, or independent practice. After you have downloaded the program, you can choose different built in alarm sounds to sound off when the time expires. You can even personalize the timer by having a short message scroll across the screen.


Another feature on this free timer is you can change the colors of the digits, buttons, and backgrounds to match your needs.

You and your students will enjoy all these unique features on this free timer. Hope you enjoy this tool. I would recommend you downloading this program to your home computer so you can play with it. Once you have learned all the different features I mentioned above, you will be ready to download it your computer at school.

Next week I will be sharing with you a fun random number generator you can use with your students to make sure they are picked randomly when you ask them questions. Yes, you can even type their name in the random generator to personalize it. See you next week.

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