Tag Archives: @royanlee

NXNEi Reflections

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Let me tell you about last Friday:

I got up, opened up my lap top, and checked in with my e-learning students. Then I had a leisurely breakfast and made my way to the train station (just a few blocks from my place which is rather convenient).

Hopped on the train with plenty of time to spare and enjoyed the trip to Toronto. I love taking the train. Love it!

I walked to the Hyatt Regency and checked in only to find I’d gotten a free room upgrade! Sweet!

After dropping off my stuff in my sweet suite, I waded through a sea of hipsters to meet up with Shannon, Brent, and my Twitter brother, Royan. We were treated like rock stars: green room full of cookies and energy drinks, escorts to our speaking venue, bright, but flattering lighting on the stage, ubiquitous tech support… Completely stress free.

We only had about 30 people in our session but they were fantastic and asked wonderful questions, which led us to the conclusion that maybe we should speak on non-education centered conferences more often! This is not to say that the education conferences we usually attend aren’t fantastic, but sometimes we feel like we’re either preaching to the choir or encountering a lot of defensiveness. I think sometimes other teachers feel threatened when they see a presentation because they feel that the implication is that if they are not doing the same thing as the speaker that the presenters must think they’re bad teachers. The kind of defensiveness these reactions tend to provoke really prevent meaningful discussion

This was a wonderful experience and I really want to thank Shannon Smith for putting it together.

Things I’d love to see at our conferences that I saw at NXNEi:

  • a slick iPhone app to help you organize the sessions that you’re attending
  • well-designed super cool t-shirts available for purchase
  • girls walking around giving out free gummy candy
  • music!

How I’m using If This Then That

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One of the best new tools that I took away with me from this year’s ECOO conference was If This Then That. Thank you, Zoe and Doug for showing me this super-cool site.

This is not the kind of site that I would show people who are fairly new to Web 2.0 tools, but for people like me who are already using Twitter, Evernote, Diigo, Dropbox, WordPress (to name a few), IFTTT just makes a heck of a lot of sense.

IFTTT allows you to create tasks (or if you need some inspiration, you can browse a list of “recipes”) that make different apps work together. For example, wouldn’t it be cool if everytime that @shareski guy tweeted something, his messages would show up in an Evernote folder that I’d created? IFTTT would let you do it! Or I could send @royanlee’s tweets to a WordPress blog dedicated to his awesomeness. Well… that example might be a bit stalkerish as @royanlee and I realized. But, IFTTT would let you do it!

So here’s how I’m actually using it so far:

If a file is uploaded to my Dropbox, then IFTTT sends me a text message. (I have students submit files to me using www.dropitto.me so I love getting a message telling me when I’ve gotten a file.)

If a Twitter search result turns up for @MsBarkerTweets (my teacher Twitter handle… in other words if someone sends an @ message to my teacher account) then IFTTT sends me a text message. This way, a student can “text” me without texting me. You see?

If I create a bookmark on Diigo, then that bookmark also goes to a folder I’ve made in Evernote called Diigo bookmarks. It even imports the tags!

Finally I’m trying to figure out a way to archive Tweets on a WordPress blog for when I remount my Hamlet/Twitter role play with my grade 12s in a month. I had hoped there would be a way to say: If someone on a list called _______________ tweets, send the tweet to WordPress. It doesn’t seem like I can do that though. I can however have each individual Twitter handle sent to the blog.

So that’s how I’m using IFTTT so far but there are so many possibilities to explore. (I do also plan on blogging my ECOO11 reflections soon!) Thanks for pushing me to finish this, Dean. ;)

How are you using IFTTT?