Twitter

I've never really understood the point or appeal of Twitter. I guess the appeal is that the information is quick and easy, and the point is to get people to absorb your information as quickly and easily as possible. I can defintely see why a business would use Twitter to keep its customers on the lookout for promotions or updates; I have a friend who's a massage therapist, and she tweets to offer her clients deals occasionally, using the concept that the first ten clients to respond to her in the next hour will receive discounts on services. This use makes sense to me, as does news updates, or school closings - things that can change quickly and may have significant impact on my day.
Personally I don't have much need for celebrity tweets -  I like to read about celebrities but I don't need to know where they got their coffee or what they're watching on TV. But that's just my opinion - I certainly don't judge others for their interests!
Setting up a Twitter account is very easy, and using it is easy as well. I'm glad I've had the experience of getting to know it, but I in my current job as a library assistant I don't think I'd need to use it (as I mentioned in my previous post the students there use edmodo, so I could use that to communicate with students if the need arose). I will play around with it some more to try to find other useful ways to utilize it.
I guess I could see the educational value of Twitter, though I might use Twiducate to ensure safety.

Exploration

How did I miss the "SAVE NOW" button at the bottom?
I found a lot of good stuff in my exploring this week. I loved the blogs in education matrix (http://www.edtechpost.ca/wp-content/blogs.dir/2/files/2008/10/matrix2.gif); I think it's a helpful tool for all librarians and teachers to keep on hand when they are planning or conceptualizing different ways to use blogs in the classroom, or for their professional use.
I like the idea of twiducate (http://twiducate.com/), and the tutorial video was cute and definitely peaked my interest. I think that students, especially older ones, might like getting occasional reminders or updates via tweets. However, I didn't like that you had to sign up for an account and give the site your personal information without being able to see the site in action - I would have like to seen some sample or demo pages/accounts.
The school I work at uses edmodo (http://www.edmodo.com/) for students to see and submit assignments, and it seems to be very popular among students and staff. I like that it's quite safe and secure, and the social networking aspects of it - in fact, I just joined today in order to join the online portion of the student book group the librarian and I run for kids once a month. The online aspect of the group is nice for the kids to contribute to, but perhaps just as importantly, it helps keep the book group in their mind, so they don't forget when our meetings are, what we're reading, things to discuss, etc. All of these online applications seem to be great ways to keep school topics on kids' minds, just in slightly varying formats. One issue with edmodo or any of these programs - especially if teachers require students to get or submit assignments through them - is that when the internet goes down, they're inaccessible, and for a highly technological school district that seems to happen a lot where I work!
I also thought the WordPress 10 Step Tutorial (http://learn.wordpress.com/) was helpful and quite nice to look at, but almost overwhelmingly long. I had a hard time keeping track of all of their steps and suggestions...though perhaps if that had been the first and not the fifth site I had looked at in one sitting, I would have had more patience.

Next up: Twitter.

blogger.com

I had just finished composing a long (long) post about blogs, the merits of blogger.com, and the educational possibilities of this format, making sure to copy the entire message every few lines - I've lost too many posts on Blackboard by accidentally highlighting and erasing the whole thing when one finger hits one wrong key, twice - when one wrong finger hit one wrong key, twice, and the entire post disappeared. An hour of work, down the drain! Here's what I've learned:
Upsides of blogger.com:
it is quite easy to navigate
it is even easier to set up an account
things that might be hard to understand, like putting in "Gadgets" (personally, I wasn't sure what was meant by that), are explained clearly and the user is prompted about how and when to use them
the physical setup is clean and neat, but still visually appealing
Downsides of blogger.com:
COPYING your entry and then trying to PASTE it into a new entry (after you've accidentally deleted everything you've done) does NOT seem to work. Do not trust the COPY!
The toolbar buttons also do not seem to work. The LINK button wouldn't make URLs into hyperlinks - I tried and tried, and ended up just writing out the URLs. The U underline button doesn't seem to work, and the same goes for the bullets.  If this site is so intuitive in so many other ways, what am I missing??
I've learned my lesson...I'm going to keep this short and add another entry before I erase more work...