Part of my job is teaching students effective search tools on the internet. There are many tricks that help students hone in on a topic with relevant, reliable information.
A second level of research is to check out the websites reliability. There are a few ways to do that:
Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.
One of these tells you the value of your website. Click around and figure out which one it is.
By now you’ve most likely joined Twitter (and if you haven’t, you need to, pronto!). Twitter is not only a great place for businesses and marketers, but it’s also a great place to spruce up your writing skills.
Yes. You read that correctly.
Twitter can make you a better writer. Here’s how.
Twitter forces you to be concise
If you’ve ever used Twitter, you know that you have 140 characters to say whatever you want to say. Now keep in mind, I didn’t say 140 words—or even 140 letters—I said 140 characters.
That’s not a lot of room. Letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation and spaces all count as characters on Twitter.
What all of this means is, you have to be concise. You have to know exactly what you want to say, and say it in as few words as possible.
Many writers, however, are “wordy” and often have long, drawn out descriptions and sentences, so it can be pretty difficult to create a message that’s only 140 characters.
Here’s where Twitter comes in again.
Twitter forces you to exercise your vocabulary
Since you only have 140 characters to get your message across, you’re forced to dust off your dictionary and thesaurus and find new words to use—Words that are shorter, words that are more descriptive, and words that get the job done in 140 characters or less.
Crafting a message for Twitter requires you to “pump up” your verbs (replacing adverbs and adjectives with them), and discover a better, clearer and more concise way to say what you want to say.
Now most people won’t hit 140 characters right away. No, they’ll end up with 160 or 148 characters to start out with (Twitter tells you how many characters you need to remove to make your message fit).
This is the final way that Twitter makes you a better writer.
Twitter forces you to improve your editing skills
Every writer needs to be able to edit their work. And by using Twitter, you can really hone your editing skills and make them top-notch.
It’s almost like playing a game; trying to write a 140-character message and still get your point across in a way that inspires your followers to take action, to click on your link or to “retweet” your post.
I like to think of it as a brainteaser, forcing me to think hard and dig deep down into my vocabulary to find a way to shorten my message.
I’ve been using Twitter since January, and my writing skills have not only improved, but I’ve been writing better copy as well.
Yet another reason you should be using Twitter. Not that you needed one.
Wikis, blogs, social networks and a whole lot more Web 2.0 tools are the most exciting thing to happen to education since public schools.Kids love them. They’re drawn in, want to get involved, thirst to share their thoughts. Here’s the interesting part to us teachers: If students want anyone to read what they write, they have to do it correctly–and they’re willing to make this effort for a blog.
That’s right. There are rules to follow. You’d think people would tire of posting to oblivion. No readers. No comments. They’d give up and try something new. But they don’t. They buckle down and try to follow the unique rules inherent in blogs and wikis that, if followed, will draw readers. The effort is worth the reward, which seems to be the joy of gaining a following (it sure isn’t the money).
Check out One Cool Site by Timethief. She has post after post of suggestions for increasing the popularing of your blog. It covers mundane, ancient topics like grammar, pithiness of content, exciting headlines. Then scoot over to Problogger for more on the right way to write blogs (different ideas, same message).
As a teacher, I originally thought blogs (and social networks for that matter) were way too modern for rules. Look at texting. It’s developed an entire neologistic vocabulary, complete with spelling and new letters (i.e., emoticons). Boy was I wrong. My blog didn’t get read until I checked it for:
pithy content
correct spelling and grammar
appeal to my readers (a great lesson for students–make sure your voice fits your audience)
interaction with readers via questions in the blog and answering comments when there were any
the three paragraph structure (just like students learn in school): first to attract search engines with a scintillating synopsis, second to appeal to my audience, third to tie everything down to a conclusion (and maybe leave them wanting more)
mistakes, redundancies, flow by proof reading. I had to verify point of view, confirm facts–just like when students write an essay or story
To show you how much people are talking about blogs and wikis on the internet, I created this chart in Technorati, comparing the occurrence of all three topics:
So get over it parents. These Web 2.0 tools are not going away, which is a good thing. They’re student-centered and pithy. They sneak in volumes of lessons on good writing, and are full of the five-second info kids love.
I don’t understand why textbooks can’t be digital. We have the technology. They could be in pdf format–doesn’t have to be on Kindle or one of those readers that cost a lot to own. And, the brilliant American entrepreneurs could create one that reads like a book–my Scribd books can be read that way, downloaded as a pdf, embedded into a digital document.
When I chatted with a librarian friend about this, she was aghast. Why? Well, the librarian associations were against it. I have to believe when she can give me a better answer, she’ll agree with me.
My friend, Chris, over at Tech Worthy does a great job of keeping up to date on the latest news. Something I should do better–but why when I have him to lean on? Here’s a post on my favorite browser Firefox (I dumped IE years ago when it became too darn temperamental):
Mozilla’s Firefox browser is about to hit a major milestone: 1 billion total downloads. As you can see on this Twitter account (updates every 15 minutes or so) and this one (updates every million reached) set up to monitor the download numbers, it just crossed the 999,000,000 threshold earlier today. Judging by the rate at which it’s increasing, it could hit the milestone as early as tomorrow. You can see a simple, but pleasing live download counter here.
And Mozilla is preparing for the big day with a new site (not live yet), called www.onebillionplusyou.com, which will go live on Monday. There, you’ll find information about the one billion downloads Firefox has seen. When the browser hits the milestone, more information should also be available here.
Firefox has made a major dent in Internet Explorer’s marketshare over the past few years. The latest numbers put IE’s share just over 54%, while Firefox approaches 30%. That’s pretty incredible when you consider that just a few years ago, IE had over 90% marketshare.
This one billion number is obviously for all the versions of Firefox, since it was launched in 2002 (though the Firefox name officially took hold in 2004). The most recent major version, 3.5, launched exactly a month ago today. It zoomed past a million downloads very quickly, and had 5 million downloads after day one — a huge number, though not quite as huge as the Firefox 3.0 launch.
Not for shopping, which those who should know consider to be the killer app for internet use. The top reasons: to learn, have fun and socialize. Sounds like a teachers dream. Look at this:
I know computer training is pretty dry. But I figure if I get enough of you over here, you’ll stay. Especially when you see some of the amazing stuff you can do with computers, like hacking… For help, I went to the professionals…
Have you met Cheru at Alphainventions? I think we need to hire him to solve the health care crisis, here in America, though I think a few other people have dibs on him first. Here’s how he markets his website:
The huge truck got stuck under the bridge, and many men tried to get it out for hours and failed until the creator of alphainventions.com told them let the air out of the tires to set it free.
I spent twenty minutes reading his website just because his wisdom is so refreshing. OK. go see it yourself. I know you’ll agree.
It’s hard to get noticed. Technorati says they’re tracking over 112.8 million blogs:
About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or… 1.4 new blogs every second
1.5 million posts per day, or… 17 posts per second
Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
English second at 33%
Chinese third at 8%
…which is why I’m thankful to my #1 source of new readers: Condron. When I noticed so many people finding me through Condron, I checked them out. They’re an interesting way to surf the blogosphere.
PS BTW, blogs are a great way to encourage reading and writing in kids. More about that later.
Posted by worddreams 
Posted by worddreams 
Posted by worddreams 
I don’t understand why textbooks can’t be digital. We have the technology. They could be in pdf format–doesn’t have to be on Kindle or one of those readers that cost a lot to own. And, the brilliant American entrepreneurs could create one that reads like a book–my 
Mozilla’s Firefox browser is about to hit a major milestone: 1 billion total downloads. As you can see on this Twitter account (updates every 15 minutes or so) and this one (updates every million reached) set up to monitor the download numbers, it just crossed the 999,000,000 threshold earlier today. Judging by the rate at which it’s increasing, it could hit the milestone as early as tomorrow. You can see a simple, but pleasing live download counter here.
alphainventions.com told them let the air out of the tires to set it free.
