Here are a few good reads you may have missed in the last week or so, including an invitation to enter an article for a blog carnival, the deadline for which is this Sunday!

Another Ed Tech Blog Carnival

Have you ever heard of blog carnivals? In case the answer is “No”, here is a quick explanation. Unlike “real” carnivals, where you have to go somewhere and take part in some sort of revelry and celebration, blog carnivals are much easier because all you have to do is sit at home or in a café somewhere and write a blog post on a particular theme. You submit that to a certain person by a certain date.  The links to all those blog articles are then collated into a single blog post, and that is the carnival. Blog carnivals are a great way of not only showcasing your own blog to a potentially new readership, but for you to find out about other blogs you didn’t know about before.

Interactive whiteboard guru and general all-round nice chap Danny Nicholson has decided to run another ed tech blog carnival this year. He ran an inaugural ed tech carnival last year, and that was pretty successful. It featured 15 links to articles, many of which were written by bloggers I hadn’t come across before. So far so good, but here is the bad news: if you’d like to submit an article link for this new blog carnival, you have to get it to Danny by noon GMT on Sunday 29th January 2012. Check out the Whiteboard Blog for more details, and instructions.

Digital Learning Day

Believe it or not, February 1st has been designated as Digital Learning Day in the USA. A strange name, because for me every day is a digital learning day, but it sounds like an interesting way of bringing together some good ideas and practice. I learnt about this through the ever-interesting blog, Kevin’s Meandering Mind. He has written a blog post entitled Digital Learning Day: The Tech We Use, which itself demonstrates the tech we use. Worth reading.

The power of Twitter

I enjoyed the post entitled Why Twitter? by Megan Douglas, who is a student reading for a teaching degree at the University of Plymouth. In her post, Megan describes her transition from celebrity “stalker” to serious tweeting, and the benefits of using Twitter. It’s a good introduction to Twitter, and is also an interesting example of someone who has two Twitter identities, personal and professional. The post isn’t exhaustive – for instance it doesn’t mention lists – but is enough.

I thought the video included in the post was good. That in itself is strange, because I don’t usually like videos in which people just hold up cards with text on them (for my reasons, please see Did You Know We Appear To Have Lost All Critical Faculties?). However, Megan had the good sense to smile a lot in the video  and have some upbeat music as accompaniment, as opposed to the usual practice of adopting a demeanour which suggests one has just attended a funeral, with dirge-like music to match. It worked well for me also because I was able to watch it on my phone in a cafe with the sound turned off!