Neat Website: Tagboard

I was thinking, that there's no way I can get all of these neat sites I learned about at TIE out to all the Teachers before the end of the school year.

So, I decided just to make a few posts on them over the next couple weeks, and you can just remember to look at my blog sometime, and try to "catch up" on some of these when you have time.

Today's site is:  Tagboard

What Tagboard does... is it searches for things that are trending in social media, by searching the "hashtags".

Simply enter a hashtag and click search...tagboard will display your results.

I think this would be an amazing tool for studying current events.  Say you want the kids to write a reaction paper to something that happened in the news, or you just want to have a class discussion on something...you can use tagboard to pull up links to articles, and also see what people are saying out on the various social media about the subject at hand.

As you can see on the bottom of that picture, Tagboard will search: Twitter, InstaGram, Facebook, App.net, Vine, and Google+.

For instance, this is a screen capture I did this morning for #BostonBombing.

If you click on the picture to make it full size... you can see that the tweet in the top left was posted by "Justice for Jahar" and links to an article about how some men were framed in 1965.

And there are of course, photos of the memorial (from instagram), and if you were able to scroll down... you would see that there are links to multiple articles about the bombing, the suspects, and the handling of the case.

What a cool tool to use, for real time discussion of real life events!

Here is another example.  I went to Google News, and saw that the "Internal Revenue Service was one of the "Top Stories".  So, I went to Tagboard, and searched for "#IRS".  Here is my result:

Again, you may have to click on the picture to read the postings... but you have real time discussion of real events.  I did that search at 9:39 am, and every posting on this screen capture was posted at 9:38 am.  This was as the Congressional Hearing was going on... people were posting what was said, and who said it.

Can you imagine the discussions that you can get over Current Events?  And you won't be limited to "one side" of issues, because you will have people posting from around the world with different viewpoints and different ideas.

Some possible ways to use in the classroom:

• Social Studies - discussion of current events  (Both High School and elementary for that matter)
• Social Studies - use tagboard for research...finding links to current articles, blogs, etc, etc...
• Language Arts - writing a reaction paper on a current event
• Science - for instance maybe you're study "weather patterns" or something, and there is a major weather event in the news.
• Compare and Contrast - you could find opposing viewpoints on different issues, and have students look at the arguments and reasoning for both sides.

Lots of critical thinking activities could go on with this one.

If anyone is interested in learning more about Tagboard, please let me know.  If you want ideas, come and discuss with me.  Also, if you use tagboard, and want to share about your successes and/or failures please let me know.

Each of the examples I showed above, were done without having an account.  So, you don't need an account to use it.  Why would you need or want an account?  To see "protected" messages.

For Example:  I tried to do a search for #ElktonSchool to see if anything from our twitter account came across.  I normally use the hashtag #ElktonSchool on our twitter postings.  It did not.  

This is because the school's twitter account is "protected" and since I wasn't signed up and approved as a "follower" on Tagboard.  But, if I signed up for tagboard... I could link my personal twitter account to it, and since I am an approved follower, I would then be able to see those posts.