Wk 2 Response to Mike Ficara

Mike wrote:

Something that I have wanted to do for a while is show my students the power of Web 2.0 technologies and social networking. I truly believe that with all the problems it has, social networking can be a powerful tool inside and outside the classroom to communicate with our students. So I decided to send out a request to several people, mainly celebrities, that I follow on Twitter with this simple request.:
Social networking is powerful & I want to show my students that! Please mention @MrFicara & show my students the power! Thanks!
One of the biggest challenges was getting this post into 140 meaningful characters that would motivate people to respond! I think this is one of the biggest challenges with Twitter, but one of the things that make it unique!
My goal with this is two fold, one to show my students the power of social networking, and two use it as a way to motivate my students in class. It is fun to know that someone out there is thinking about you and what your doing. Also I hope to have more students begin to follow me on Twitter! After only posting for about an hour I got responses from @Adam_Schefter of ESPN and @Pam_Stenzel a national youth speaker! If you can, spread the word and help out! Thanks!

I replied:

Hi Mike,

On Friday I saw the coolest demo of twitter ever.  Here's how you can do it yourself.

Open a new public spreadsheet in Google Docs.  They have just majorly updated Google Docs so now you can see changes to a spreadsheet as they happen.

I watch several hashtags on twitter including one called #edchat. It is a very active educator group.  A person posted that she was showing people the power of twitter and gave the link to the spreadsheet.  She asked we fill it in with our favorite web 2.0 tools.

I have a few so I clicked the link.  She had arranged the spreadsheet with columns for name of the tool, your twitter name, the web address for the tool and a notes column so we could tell what the tool is.  As I watched, like magic the spreadsheet started filling itself in.  It took about 5 minutes to put about 30 entries of web 2.0 tools.  It was completely amazing!

I am going to try something like this myaelf.

Good post Mike!