CTL’s Recent Tweets

This past week Regent University's Center for Teaching & Learning (CTL) Tweeted about:

• Google Chromebooks are lightweight notebooks that come with free software and hardware updates. You pay a monthly fee and Google updates the Chromebooks' software AND hardware at the end of each hardware cycle. This may be an option to explore for schools thinking of providing their students with notebooks or laptops.  
• How faculty and students can build a web presence for their professional selves, with free and easy to use software options available online.
• YouTube Copyright School, a 4.5 min. video clip that highlights copyright law; It packs a lot of information on how to avoid copyright infringement and details things that we might do when using YouTube which actually violate copyright law.
• A guide to social media marketing best practices that Facebook just published. It is applicable to things Faculty or students do online when it comes to marketing their courses, skills, etc.

• An infograph showing how teens are using their mobile phones.
• A 4 min. video clip on how to use Twitter which demystifies the idea of using Twitter. In just 4 minutes covers the basics of how to open an account to how to start Twetting, i.e., make a post on the Twitter social networking site.
• An article on how the Android system has taken the top slot among smartphone sales with an 84.88% growth in smartphone sales worldwide, more than 100 million units sold in a single quarter.
• An announcement by amazon.com that it now sells more Kindle books than the number of hardcover and trade books combined. If we ever wondered whether eTextbooks were a good idea, wonder no more. The digital age is here to stay and digital textbooks are not far behind.
• Just to prove prior point, we found and Tweeted the link to the article "Digital Textbooks Reaching the Tipping Point in the U.S. Higher Education--a revised 5-Year Projection." The report was written by Rob Reynolds, Ph.D., Director of Product Design and Research at Xplana and offers a direct link where readers can download the actual 13 page report. For the use of Regent faculty, CTL downloaded the report and uploaded it to the Regent Technology Planning (TPC) Blackboard shell and also to the "2011 TPC" folder in the M drive.
• 5 Ways to schedule your Tweets—so they post throughout the day rather than all at once. Tweets you post show on the Tweet feed of your followers pretty much the way items on a conveyor belt would show. Each of your Twitter followers has their own Twitter feed they read. If you post all your Tweets at once, then your followers will see your Tweets roll by all at once. The caveat here is that they would have to be reading their Twitter feed at the very moment you're posting all your Tweets. The odds of this happening are low and the result is that all your Tweets not only go by at a time when your followers may not be reading their Twitter feed, but also your Tweets will be "buried" by newer Tweets others in your followers' Twitter feed are posting. The answer to this dilemma is brilliant and I was led to it by CTL's webmaster extraordinaire, Christianne Page. She let me know there are free apps we can use that post our Tweets throughout the day rather than all at once. This means we can spend a small amount of time each day to choose which topics we want to Tweet about on that day and what links we'll have on our Tweets. We then use one of the 5 suggested apps in this article to schedule our Tweets and our Twitter followers will then see one of our CTL Tweets go by on a regular basis throughout the day.