FTT - Storify

Sorting Through the Social Media Noise

@joe_edtech

On the heels of our Twitter Challenge, I thought I'd offer you a tool designed to help you sift through your social media outlets and take a closer look at the things that are important to you.

Over the summer I read a book called The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele (somebody please ponder this paradox - the link I just included will take you to Amazon.com). I found the author to be extremely nostalgic about the good old days of high minded professional journalism, and even more so about the historic ability of the two big parties to produce quality, principled candidates for public office. However, he wrote a gripping history of the growth of Big Tech in the United States, and he suggested some great online tools. One of them is storify.com.

In the chapter on the end of big journalism, Mr. Mele suggested consumers should find some way to sort through the noise of social media and create order and meaning out of chaos by using online tools like storify.com . While I don't join the author's nostalgia about principled big journalism (“…You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the War…” —Citizen Kane) I do agree that it is important for us to find ways to make sense of, and search for meaning in the Social Media outlets available to us.

Enter "Storify." If you create an account on storify.com, you can create your own news story out of the social media posts available to you. If you want to find all of the meaningful blogs, news stories posted on Facebook, or search for first hand Twitter accounts of world events, all you have to do is create a new story and search for the topic the way you would in Google.

Then you play editor. You decide which stories, posts, and tweets are important, and you create your own Social Media story. I've embedded a "Storify" story on "Storify" below. I know, not very creative.

What would be creative, though, is using tools like Storify and other social media tools to teach digital citizenship and Internet safety to your students. But I'll save that for the next post. 

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How would you use storify.com with students?

STORIFY ON STORIFY: