Cool Cat Teacher Blog is at coolcatteacher.com

Privacy is a freedom we give ourselves. It is spring break. Facebook is full of my friends saying where they are (with their whole families), and it looks like most of them are posting publicly. Someone could easily look at the Camilla, Georgia and publicly see who is out of town. Location Based Girl-Finding App Uses FourSquare and Facebook Girls Around Me , the app that used Foursquare and Facebook location data to reveal the whereabouts of girls located around a person, had people upset . It is now pulled from the iTunes store after losing Foursquare API access . The Russian-based developer told the Wall Street Journal that: " Girls Around Me does not provide any data that is unavailable to the user when he uses his or her social network account, nor does it reveal any data that users did not share with others." Is Sharing Your Location a Big Deal? The fact is that girls and adults ARE sharing this information. Websites like pleaserobme have tried to poi...

Image via CrunchBase A recent list from Education Next of "Most Influential Twitterers" listed me at the top of the list of Educator Tweeters based on Klout scores. I've written about Klout before on this blog in my 7 golden rules of Tweeting and am wary of anything that tries to compartmentalize "influencers" on Twitter. I can say this because it isn't sour grapes. I have a higher Klout score than anyone on the list - at least today - or until someone figures out a major person left off the list - and there are many. ( @rmbyrne and @angelamaiers are just two I can think of off hand. You'll think of tons more as well.) Klout and Influence ARE NOT the same thing. I'm sorry but Arne Duncan is the Secretary of Education here in the United States - anyone in their right mind who could think that Vicki Davis, coolcatteacher , has more influence than he does doesn't see the big picture. The big picture is that online influence is just a p...

Image via CrunchBase Every so often, businesses tweet me to follow them and help them get followers. My response to this yesterday: " Focus on useful tweets & helping people. Put others first. We tweet 2 learn, not 4 followers." I've been watching popular educational Tweeters unfollow people in droves. Upon reading 4 Keys to Increasing Your Klout Score I knew why. In Klout metrics, if you have a lot of followers and don't follow a lot of people yourself - you're considered "important" and you can more highly engage with less followers, thus upping your Klout score. They tell you to unfollow people . Don't talk to people who won't talk to you. Things like that. Before competing for "Klout." Decide if the metric fits with your reason for being on Twitter. Personally, I think that good Tweeters (or bloggers) can benefit from some good old fashioned values. I don't have 100,000 followers but am close to 19,000 as of ...

#tweettheresults hashtag on Twitter - official protest hashtag We've seen people lose their job over Tweets and we've seen them get jobs through Tweets . We've seen marriage proposals and divorce notifications . We've even see Charlie Sheen earn six figures for a tweet . Now, we might just see the balance in someone's bank account change as political tweeters in Canada openly plan to disregard the election "Twitter blackout"  law and could land themselves with a 25,000 dollar fine. Canadian officials plan to enforce a 73 year old law that slaps a person who "prematurely releases election results" with the penalty.Originally intended to keep voting in the east from influencing that in western Canada by not allowing the "transmission of election results" across time zones, critics say this was created before social media. Canada has six as the world's second largest country. #tweettheresults hashtag was in use by y...

Sweltering Last night it felt like an oven in Camilla. Over 100 degrees, the humidity made it feel like you were roasting! So, I tweeted out: coolcatteacher It is so unbelievably hot in camilla, Georgia. How hot is it? It is so hot that ____( retweets to those who fill in blank best! :-) And there were such great answers, I thought I'd share them for a little humor on Friday afternoon. They were all so great, they all deserved a retweet! So, what is so "hot" about this. Oh, we're all sick of those "I really love Twitter " posts -- the connecting, linking up, all of that.  But one of the greatest things about Twitter to me is the impromptu, unorchestrated moments that just pop out and brighten my day. I remember when I first started using Twitter and my grandmother passed away. I had friends from around the world Tweeting me their thoughts and kindnesses. I turned on my dm on my cell phone just to get them. It...

Just read this on Mashable where the Attorney General who gave the go-ahead for a firing squad execution Tweeted out the announcement. Mashable asked if it was too far? Whether it was "too far" or not, I think it was in very poor taste.  I think this is a poor use of Twitter or any type of media, but particularly Twitter. If it cannot be explained in 140 characters, it doesn't really belong in a Tweet, does it? I'd really like to know what you all think. Feel free to comment here or over at Mashable, however, I've set up a Twitter poll to get your feedback. You know, I'm coming back to this with another question. I talk to students all the time about "appropriateness" of posting things that should not be shared. How do I reconcile this? They see this as a person in authority. I don't know, I'm really upset and struggling this one as a teacher who discusses social media in the classroom on a daily basis. How would you discu...

Just now I was struggling with a customer of mine from before I was teaching that had some fancy ftp stuff going on -- the webhost had changed their ftp information and they were struggling to tell me what was on their screen. I couldn't do the windows remote because it just wouldn't work. So, in frustration, not really looking for an answer I tweeted: "I have never been able to make remote assistance work between my computer(s) and someone I wanted to help. Need to remote in to remote in. 24 minutes ago from TweetDeck " Then, I get back from Ben Grey and a few others: thegreatgar @ coolcatteacher I use logmein free and reliable great software ! 5 minutes ago from TweetDeck in reply to coolcatteacher       BlacB @ coolcatteacher I use LogMeIn. Free. Works well. http://is.gd/3T0mE Both computers require the logmein software. I use it on 4 machines. 19 minutes ago from web in reply to coolcatteacher       stephenksu @ co...

Last week, I shared about some lists made over on Tweepml that made it easy to follow - well, when I came across Mashable's list of 100+ literary authors to follow on twitter, I couldn't resist making some more lists and digging out some new ones.  I always tell people - don't judge twitter until you follow at least 50 people.  Note that if you've already followed someone, no harm is done and you have the choice to not follow someone when you click the button - you just check the list - it is so useful.: 112 Authors on Twitter from Mashable To get all of them, you'll need to follow both lists! 100+ Twitter Authors part 1     100+ Twitter Authors part 2   (if you wish to suggest new authors to add, suggest it on this list on the right side of the page.)   NonFiction Authors on Twitter (from another post Non-fiction authors on Twitter ) Educator Lists Just click the links below to be asked who you want to follow. 100 Learning Professionals ...

Making it easy to create lists to follow on Twitter. Just came across this post by my friend, Marshall K, about a new service called TweepML which lets you create lists of users. He's created one about the Real Time web , but of course, I want to make one about educators. The only problem is that I truly hate lists like this because some people might just swoop through and think that they've followed "everyone". So, here we go - I've started a list and want you to add to it. There are lots of cool tools out there: Free Tools for Educators has a list of 7 ways to find teachers on Twitter and I went to Liz B. Davis' Google Docs Spreadsheet of educators on twitter to attempt to rip from that list, however the links aren't hyperlinks so I couldn't do it. So, I headed over to Connexions and ripped the list of 100 featured educators on twitter . Now, I have 100 educators from that list to share with you on this list from TweepML. Educators on ...

I've not ever accepted advertisers on my blog - Google Adsense just doesn't give me control. I have however, used Amazon Affiliate program, just because I share so many books and although it isn't enough to cover the costs I have with the various cool cat teacher websites I have, it still is a little bit. Well, recently Amazon has made it very clear that they weren't going to accept tweets as generating affiliate income.  Which was a bummer, although I didn't do it intentionally, when Kindle 2   came out, I tweeted it and had gotten about $80 in income showing in the affiliate account with amazon - but it came out that Amazon doesn't count tweets - so, easy come, easy go and they took it out of my affiliate income.  That is NOT why I do cool Cat Teacher, anyway. But when I saw I'vread on TechCrunch this Sunday, I was intrigued.  This newly launched website gives you two useful features: 1)  Tweet:  any book you've read @ivread and a review  ...

Was zoning out at the Mashable website and noticed their cool little "retweet this" button at the top of the blog post about planning your vacation with social networking tools . When I retweeted saw that tweetmeme was the reply address that seemed to generate this handy thing and went on over. Now, the tweetmeme has instructions for several types of blogs: Adding to wordpress Adding to blogge r But I hand wrote my code in the OLD blogger and so had to dust off the HTML cobwebs to make this thing work. Here is the code I inserted just before my blog inserts the post of my blog: Update: So, I was perplexed as to why my twitterid didn't appear in the retweet like mashable's did and looked at the page source -- I've now added one extra line to this code (note: they Don't tell you how to do this on tweetmeme!) where the tweetmeme_source should be set to my name so I added tweetmeme_source = 'coolcatteacher'; before the ending script tag and poof --...

I've used twitter tools of all kinds, but these are the five that have gone the distance with me. 1) TweetDeck Tweet deck is my favorite way to interface with twitter. It is easy to friend and follow, but it has a handy "search" tool and I can see every tweet that mentions the world "teach."  This helps me find people, see opinions about teachers, and see those people across all professions who love to teach others.  I find friends this way and people I want to follow. 2) Strawpoll This handy tool lets you create a new poll everyday or as you feel like it.  The trick is for people to learn how to reply.  They should just type your name and then one of your two selected answers along with any other thoughts they want to share.   So, in response to my poll yesterday , I could respond: @coolcatteacher No - We try, however, I don't think everyone truly understands special needs.  The vote would be counted and the extra text added on the right since tha...