All the teachers finally made the jump away from Twitter, and they’re all gathering at BlueSky. What should we know about it?
Brent Warner 0:21
Welcome to the DIESOL podcast, where we focus on developing innovation in English as a second or other language. I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL at Irvine Valley College, and I’m here with the wonderful ishchell Reyes, award winning educator and all sorts of world traveler et cetera. Ishchell, how’s it going? It’s
Ixchell Reyes 0:43
great. I can’t believe we’re wrapping up 2024
Brent Warner 0:47
getting close. Yep, I know things are things are crazy, things are shifting. We all need to we all need a minute to take a break. But I think we’re at least four years away from that. So how are you doing? Otherwise,
Ixchell Reyes 1:05
I’m doing pretty great. Pretty great. I love Saudi Arabia. Yeah, yeah.
Brent Warner 1:14
It’s, looks like it’s a lot of fun and everything. So that’s very cool. Today we’re going to talk. It’s not exactly ESL specific, right? This conversation, although we’ll be, we’ll be tying it in. But we do talk about this every once in a while, Ixchell, back back in the day, you and I were big advocates for Twitter, right, as a professional development platform and all these things. You know, I used to get people angry by saying I learned more learn more on Twitter than I did from my Master’s.
Ixchell Reyes 1:49
Absolutely the same.
Brent Warner 1:50
Right? And so, so then, you know, we did an episode on this probably a year ish or so ago, when Musk bought Twitter and it started to become, you know, I mean, basically a Nazi platform, right? I mean, I think we can say it pretty straightforward, you know, there it’s a lot of these people who are banned, got put back in, you know, lots, I guess a lot of porn has come up in there too. Like, I don’t know, it’s like, apparently, it’s just become terrible. I haven’t been on it very much only for brief peaks here and there, or to, you know, they used to I deleted all of my posts except for one, and then they kept reinstating them, so I kept having to log back in to delete them again. You know, there was, like, a lot of really suspicious stuff going on, and it seems like, apparently, that was an effort to train their AI. I mean, not good stuff, right? So, so we shifted, and we all started kind of scattering to the wind. And ishchell, you kind of went nowhere, right? You’re just like, no more social media for for you, not totally, but, but in a big part, right?
Ixchell Reyes 2:57
Yeah. And it was kind of like there were so many competitors come well, not, I wouldn’t even, I guess not competitors popping up that it was sort of at a time when I was overwhelmed with social media that the pandemic had just sort of reached its end, I guess or not, not the end. But I was overwhelmed, and there was a lot of negativity. And just on principle, I couldn’t stay on Twitter, and it took way too much effort to try to get people over to Mastodon or a couple of the others. So I think I’ve sort of, I’m more of a lurker at the moment.
Brent Warner 3:39
Yeah, yeah, that was episode 92 it looks like so..
Ixchell Reyes 3:45
That’s a whole 100 episodes ago. No, wait, no, (laughter)
Brent Warner 3:48
We’re at 114 No, that’s like 20 ish episodes ago, a year or so, probably, so feels like 100 episodes like 100 years ago. Yeah? So. But today we are seeing the big shift, and it looks like people are settling over at Blue Sky, right? And so we wanted to talk a little bit about it. We wanted to encourage anyone listening, if you said, Hey, I was missing things. Didn’t know where to go. We didn’t know where to go. We’ve talked about this several times throughout the you know, throughout this shift is like, well, I’ve spent a lot of time on LinkedIn, which I still like, by the way. You know, other people just kind of tried, like you said, Mastodon, a little threads, blue sky. I was always kind of peeking back and forth across them, and I was kind of like hesitant, but I was mostly settling on threads because that’s where the most action was. But then after the election, you know, it seems to me that a lot of teachers were probably upset about, you know, kind of the project 2025, thing, which is awful and looks like it’s coming in and so and so they wanted to get away from Twitter, and mostly have ended up at Blue. Sky. So we are going to share a little bit about it and say, like, Hey, what’s going on? What’s the deal, right? Like, what’s what’s happening over there, and what do I need to know? I’m not sure that we can kind of cover everything, but I think that we should get started right, or at least, at least take a look and see, and I think it’s a pretty good option for most people.
Ixchell Reyes 5:17
Yeah, so Brent, first things first. Who, who made blue sky? Because the Blue Sky’s been around for a little bit. Yeah, I had downloaded it, but I sort of played with it, and it was, sort of, it was not a lot of people were there because I was invite only at the time. We didn’t have codes. Yeah,
Brent Warner 5:38
Yeah, that was hard. It made it real slow to gain traction, I think, and when it was invite only, and it was kind of like waiting to get in. So here’s the thing. Everybody says, Oh, well, it’s owned by Jack Dorsey, who owned Twitter. So it’s kind of the same thing. He was a founder, and it was originally blue sky was kind of an attempt to make Twitter into a defederated service, right? And kind of it gets a little bit complicated, but that’s the basic idea. And so we’ll talk about Federation idea in a minute. But he hired on Jay Graber to to basically build this out and kind of make it work. And then it basically turned out it wasn’t going to work inside of Twitter, but they were still interested in doing this federated, decentralized, similar thing to Twitter. So they made it into blue sky as its own thing. So, so if you’re saying, Hey, Jack Dorsey’s the owner, he controls it, and he’s just going to hand things over to whatever, not the case, he is stepped down from the board. He is, you know, he doesn’t really have any say in what’s going on with Twitter and or with blue sky anymore, and he’s off kind of pursuing his own things. Who knows, but so at least we know blue sky is owned, or, you know, so now Jay Graber is the CEO. I’m not exactly sure the ownership structure, but the all the all the things that we’re seeing about, like, who’s running it seems to be that people are ethical, trying to figure out ways to make it a good experience for people, not promoting a bunch of garbage, all these things. And we’ll get into how that works a little bit, but, but if you want, kind of, if you want social media your way, the way that we’ve always asked in from Twitter and everything. It seems to be the closest one that’s doing the best not to, like push their algorithms in your face.
Ixchell Reyes 7:27
Yeah. So why don’t we talk a little bit about what blue sky users can expect, especially since many, I imagine, right now, many teachers that left Twitter or their friends or their PLN, acquaintances have moved over to blue sky. What can they expect? What’s different, what might be similar, etc, yeah.
Brent Warner 7:52
So the first thing, I think, the most important thing, is that it’s decentralized. It’s meaning that you don’t have to be well, or at least they’re building it this way as a federation, right? Which is, you don’t necessarily have to be on blue sky to be able to interact with blue sky stuff, right? And so when these things become actually properly federated, that’s what it means. So the the common comparison is like, if you have a Yahoo email account, you can still email and interact with someone with a Gmail account with no problems, right? But traditionally, Twitter has been like, No, you can’t do that, right? Like you’re if you’re not in Twitter, you can’t connect with another Twitter person, right? And so the this is kind of the attempt here at decentralization. And then one of the things inside of there, which is new to me, is that you are able, or you will be able, to move your followers to another platform. So if you say, Hey, I’ve spent all this time building up a group of people that I like or people that I follow, I want to take all those people with me, because I don’t like blue sky anymore. I want to go to I’m just going to use Mastodon as a loose example. I want to go to Mastodon, but I want the same people to be able to follow me. You can now do that. This is a big one for me, because Corey Doctorow wrote a pretty long article about a month ago that said that’s the reason he’s not going to blue skies, because they don’t have that feature. But then Ixchell, you shared a video where, uh, Jay Graber actually said, Hey, we actually do have that or it’s coming down the pipeline. So the ability to move people across is great. So decentralization. Video, yeah, um,
Ixchell Reyes 9:33
another thing you can expect is that there’s a little bit it sounds like there’s better moderation, community and moderation capabilities. So say you join, I mean, the platform will still have its standard rules or guidelines, but then if you create a community of users, and you can specify the rules, and that means that you can again, you can turn off by. Particular keywords I would say. And I guess we were, we were looking at labels, right? And you can, from the website, you could see screenshots of like, little toggles, and then you could, you know, follow different labels and decide whether you’re going to allow certain things or not allow certain things. So it just seems like there’s way more control in the hands of moderators, and this is probably going to be great for groups like teacher networks or, you know, once they get they become really large, and you can’t, you can’t manage that many users individually. Yeah, and
Brent Warner 10:37
this labels thing is really interesting, so it will take a deeper dive to figure this out, because I still don’t, don’t totally understand it. But, for example, you can follow certain accounts that have developed labels, and then what they do is they tag things that show up on your feed with information about it, right? And so, you know, if there’s, for example, it could be positive or negative, right? It doesn’t have to be, you know, but like, let’s keep it positive for now. And it says, hey, you know, if you wanted something, that’s going to say AI and education, and then it will flag it and say, like, Hey, this is something you wanted to be, you know, pulled about, right? It could go, it could. And I think it’s more commonly being used on the negative side, right, which is like stopping hate speech, for example, or, you know, blocking out code language that people use in order to talk about, like, to talk bad about certain groups, right? And so it’s like, okay, the coded language then gets blocked or flagged, at least for you. And so there’s some cool ways that you really take control over what you’re seeing. Instead of a group choosing it for you. You’re saying, Hey, this is what I want in my moderation, right? And so that is really powerful. And I was really interested in this idea Ixchell. I’m not sure if you heard this, but someone said, basically, like, there’s all these complaints about Blue Sky saying, Oh, it’s, you know, it’s an echo chamber or whatever. And it’s like running on the premise that the internet should be an argument area, right? Like, should be a place for debate and for arguments all the time, but like, everybody’s out there going well, when I go to, you know, hang out with my friend in a park, am I being part of an echo chamber? Am I just hanging out with my friend in a park? I really enjoyed this kind of, you know, way of thinking about it. And so anyways, yeah, there’s a lot of ways to clarify and clean up your information. So in addition to that, you you have control over your feeds. There’s no the there’s no like, one set algorithm, right? So you can go and say, Hey, I just want to see only the people that I follow. I want them all to be posted in order, right? Which is kind of what everybody has always asked for. As we mentioned earlier, you can now do that. You can set it up. You can set it up with like, you can set up lists, kind of like traditionally, like you’ve had lists, but it’s not just going to push forward, like the most popular post. You can kind of shift things around in terms of how you want to do it. So it does take some deep diving to kind of start figuring these things out, and more and more is being built, but just to be aware that it does exist as an option.
Ixchell Reyes 13:07
Yeah. So the other thing that I think is pretty cool is the privacy and data portability options. So from what I was reading, and again, I I’m still fairly new to coming back to blue sky because I had it at the beginning, but there were, there were not a lot of educators on there, and now I’m like rediscovering blue sky, and it’s this whole new place. But the platform emphasizes privacy by offering layers of privacy that can be stacked. That’s what they how they they talked about them, and the on their FAQs, you can add multiple levels of privacy, and you can stack them and so that you can be as private as you want, or I imagine, sort of like on Instagram, you can block, like, limit certain people and so they are not able to see certain things. Yeah. So that’s actually a lot better than what Twitter used to have. Twitter either had a public or a private and a block or unblock, and now you can’t even really block and unblock, yeah.
Brent Warner 14:14
So it’s, it’s pretty awful over there, but just to kind of re emphasize this, basically you can do this whole block thing where it’s like the person can’t go back and see anything that you’ve done, like they’re completely blocked off from you, right? And so they won’t be told. They won’t be able to see anything when they search for you, they won’t be able to find you, right? You can also do this thing where if someone, if someone quote, tweeted you, I guess we’re not calling it tweets, but quote posted you. I guess you can actually go in and remove the quote, so you can kind of detach the quote and say, like, Hey, you’re not allowed to have this quoted, right? So if someone comes up with and like is kind of being unreasonable and critical, and they’re doing it through a quote. So instead of a response underneath you, you can separate it, so their comment will be there, but they won’t. There won’t be any attachment to your name or or for people to pile on. So again, a lot of cool privacy stuff inside of there. Yeah, and
Ixchell Reyes 15:12
I think along with that is the data portability. Whereas other platforms, Twitter, the only way to get your data was or the only way to get rid of your data was to ask them to delete it. You couldn’t take it with you. You can you couldn’t even now, when you go in there, your data might still be there, even though you asked it to delete it. I don’t trust it either. But now users can move servers, which means you will take your data with you, and that’s something that I think users had been asking for for a while, and many of the other platforms. Yeah,
Brent Warner 15:48
absolutely. So if you’re kind of getting in, I think we’ll talk a little bit about the practical side of things now here, which is, if you’re kind of getting in, there’s lots of guides now out there. So if you kind of say, like, you know, basics of whatever. But I like this one. It was someone wrote it up on a Google Doc and just shared it out. It’s called How to Blue Sky by this person was, what was their name? It was Christian, Sinclair Claire, yeah, something like that. So just a person who used it but wrote out this document kind of helping you understand these things. What do the settings look like? What do they recommend? Some of those labels and like, kind of how everything works. And even recognizing things like the names on blue sky are a little bit more complicated. The handles right, like at Twitter, it was just, you know, at Brent G Warner, but with blue sky, it becomes at Brent G Warner, dot, B, s, k, y, dot, social, right? Which is, that’s the part I will say, like that just seems a lot, and it seems like kind of heavy to kind of communicate that clearly, but you can go and tie it directly to your domain name. So I’ve done it for myself, which is, I’ve got my own domain name at Brent G Warner. So when you come into blue sky, you can actually have which I have, you cannot have mine, but at Brent G warner.com, right? And that’s, that’s my whole handle on blue sky. There’s no dot, B, s, k, y, dot app, or dot social, or anything like that. It’s just at Brent G warner.com because I can connect it to my own personal account. And so that’s kind of a cooler way of doing verification than like, Oh, this is a, you know, this is a celebrity, or whatever else it is. So if it’s like, if it’s going to be, you know, the rock and he has Dwayne johnson.com whatever, right? He might just be at Dwayne johnson.com and you don’t necessarily need to know that he’s verified by blue sky, because he’s verified by himself. That he is
Ixchell Reyes 17:56
verified by himself. You don’t have to pay $100 monthly to have that little check mark.
Brent Warner 18:04
Yeah. So interesting stuff though, yeah, yeah.
Ixchell Reyes 18:08
So Brent, I’ve only recently gone back, and I think you’ve been way more active than I have been on there. And I’m wondering whether teachers are using it with students. Are they using it similarly to Twitter, because obviously that’s why I went back to it. And on Twitter, we were so we were active. We were active on the Ed chats, the slow chats, the groups, the communities, and what has been your experience recently?
Brent Warner 18:36
I mean, I feel like it’s old Twitter, honestly, like it’s just like the good old days of, like, people trying to get in there, sharing, there’s still a lot of like, you know, I don’t know if it’s like, promotional stuff, I think it’s just people getting their feet back under them, right? Like, just kind of excited when you come back to that party, you know, like, Hey, I’ve been gone, and now I’m at the party, and I see all the people that I know. It’s just fun to go see people, right? And so I think there’s some of that going on, and I felt a little bit of the draw of, like, wait a second, I was kind of getting used to not having social media, and now I’m being pulled back into that. So I have mixed feelings about that side of it. I’m not sure, are you excited or wanting to come back? I
Ixchell Reyes 19:15
you know, I’m I’m excited because it’s like you said, it’s the whole, it’s like the old gang and and I’m seeing people posting what they’re doing in class, people posting their insights, and it’s exciting, and but I’m a little bit more hesitant at participating, and I know that that’s part of the experience, and I think it’s because there was so much invested time and energy into the previous platform, that maybe that’s just my coping mechanism of of safety, yeah, yeah. And so I’m lurking, and I think that that’s normal. I think that’s probably the way a lot of educators that may be thinking about moving over, how they might feel, because, again, if you’ve moved over, you’ve gotta let go. You can’t. Be attached to the old platform, right? And letting go is difficult sometimes, especially when that’s where you’re like, I’d say your digital stomping grounds, but, but it’s good. I have a good feeling, and it doesn’t feel overwhelming, like there’s too much information. It’s enough that I scroll and read a few things, click on a few people, and it’s just exciting to see that educators are there. That’s, I think probably it’s almost like I’m crawling out of a cave after a 10 years sleep or something.
Brent Warner 20:34
Yeah, I think that’s probably fair. So just to kind of, I’m not 100% sure. I think I’ll kind of reiterate this several times right now, it’s still early days, like a lot of people are excited and they’re kind of moving over, and so it’s like, okay, that first burst of energy where a lot of people go, Okay, this is it. Our party’s back on. But does that party dissipate or does it kind of, does it have enough momentum right before it did not hit the critical point. We talked about that, right? It’s like when we were going in in, you know, 2023 and looking at things, it was like, not enough people are doing anything. But now it’s kind of like it seems to have hit that critical point. I’m seeing enough things that are like hints that will probably last a little bit longer, but we’re not 100% sure. So,
Ixchell Reyes 21:24
and again, I think it’s important to remember that it’s not Twitter. Yeah, it’s something different. It feels and looks like Twitter, and it functions in this in a similar manner to the original, like the original, legit Twitter. And so as people get used to it, they’re going to start seeing things that maybe, maybe, like, the 2.0 version of what we used to have, right? Yes, and some of those being the chats,
Brent Warner 21:52
yeah. So I think that’s the big thing, right? It’s like a lot of us are going to try to form it first into what we’ve known, and then I think it will kind of naturally move into what it becomes, right? So chats. Ishchell, there have been a few chats, and I was, I’ve only so far participated a tiny bit in one, but they have the edu sky chat. So hashtag, Edu sky chat, Mondays at six o’clock Pacific. And so Wait,
Ixchell Reyes 22:20
yeah, yeah. I just thought we totally did not say that we needed that the hashtag you need to be following or looking for is edger sky, and that’s just like an easy hashtag, and it just kind of flows, right, yes, it’s great. So I’m just excited, because when I saw it, I was so excited. Yeah, Edu sky. Oh
Brent Warner 22:42
my gosh, yeah. Edu sky, so it’s easy to kind of know, hey, we’re teachers. We’re talking about education in there. Hashtags by themselves just exist fully here, which is threads had kind of really throttled the hashtag thing, which is one thing I didn’t like about threads, but back into regular hashtags. So yeah, Edu sky and so they have edu sky chat. They also have edu sky AI, which is on Thursdays at five o’clock Pacific, and then coming in January, Ixchell, is El chat, which is going to be Larry Ferlazzo and I think Valentina Gomez, right? And so some really cool, big hitters in the game coming out back making it happen. El conversation, so I’m looking forward to that one too. And then one other thing here, just with the chats too, is if you, if you use Tweet Deck, or tweet fall, or one of those ones before there’s one called deck dot blue, and that’s the website. Is deck dot blue, and it does the same thing. It pulls in all of your stuff. And a cool thing that I learned on here is to use an app outside of blue sky. You create a password app. So it’s only a password for that one app outside of the system. And you’ve probably seen this on other things that you’ve used, right? Like, if you use Apple, you make a password for this one calendar, for example, right? So it’s the same kind of idea, which is, hey, they get access to it, but it’s done through a specific password that you created, which is very easy. It’s a one click thing. But if I wanted, for example, in the future, for that outside service to lose access, it’s a very quick cut off too, again, kind of protecting that privacy. So yeah, there’s a lot of stuff there. Now, let’s talk a little bit. Ishchell about who to follow. What have you seen so far about following people.
Ixchell Reyes 24:42
So the first thing I did was look for you, because I knew that if I found you, I it, I could probably find a few other names that I was familiar with. And so it’s sort of like I, you know, it’s impossible to remember everyone I was following. On Twitter, my favorites are there so Larry Ferlazzo, oh my gosh, I can’t think of any at the moment, but all of the names that would constantly pop up as I was able to quickly find those, and then going into their their list of followers, I could recognize a few more, and I knew like those were names I was constantly seeing and I was constantly learning from. So I haven’t had a lot of trouble finding people. It’s, it’s actually, yeah, it’s actually been easier than I thought. And I don’t mourn any followers. I don’t remember, because I think either naturally, I’ll eventually come upon them, or it’s sort of like a cleanse, you know, like, maybe there are a lot of people that were not using the platform before, and maybe it’s, it’s, you know, the it’s just a good, a good time to start, not totally from scratch, but again, it’s a new platform. You’ve gotta let go of other things and not be too attached, because it’ll, it’ll rob you from the experience of what blue sky is and what it isn’t – which is Twitter.
Brent Warner 26:08
Yeah, I think that’s right. And so you’ll see a lot of those people. I always do feel guilty as soon as I see them and that I’m not following them. So like I saw on there recently, I’m like, Oh, I’m not following Ann, I gotta, but it just happens, right? It’s part. It’s part of what happens is, like, you don’t automatically follow everybody. You just kind of gotta start a little bit and get going, but they’ll show up and again, like you said, Follow the people that you do know, a couple people, and then you just start looking through their follow list, and then start going, yeah. Another thing that’s been cool ishchell, have you seen these starter packs?
Ixchell Reyes 26:44
I learned about them from you. I think. Oh yeah.
Brent Warner 26:50
Okay, so I guess, well, it’s basically just a list, right? It’s a list of of people, but blue sky makes it easy to make these lists.
Ixchell Reyes 26:59
Oh, wait a minute, yeah, yes. Okay, so the starter pack I did. I think it was Larry for lazos first list that I saw, and he was going around asking who would like to be placed on there so that we could quickly find each other. And I loved it, because it was like, Yeah, I’m kind of new at this thing, even though I know how to use a social platform. But yeah, so that’s the starter pack, correct?
Brent Warner 27:23
Yeah yeah – it’s just a list of people. But there’s a couple – There’s actually tons of them out there. I’ve seen them for like, hey, you know Western Upper New York teachers group, right? Like, all sorts of crazy things, right? But the communities, yeah, it’s great. But I saw this one that was, well, one, of course, Larry Ferlazzo ELL teachers list. We’ll put this in the show notes. Anna Mills, who does a lot of interesting writing around ai ai and writing education and policy, so she put together a list of of those kind of teachers. And so go out there and find some of these lists. We’ll put a couple in the show notes for you as well. But once you get going, you know, if you were familiar with Twitter stuff, you’ll find it’s quite familiar. If you’re new to it, it’s pretty easy to get started, but it does seem like there’s a pretty, you know, full and robust back end that will take some sorting out from all of us. So so Ixchell for now you and I are both on there, right? I’m at @BrentGWarner.com, where are you at? What’s your what’s your handle? I’m
Ixchell Reyes 28:29
at Ixy, no underscore, Pixy, because it doesn’t allow you to have underscores.
Brent Warner 28:40
@Ixypixy.bsky.social,
Ixchell Reyes 28:41
Just search ixypixy, you’ll find my picture, because I haven’t memorized that handle.
Brent Warner 28:46
Yeah, it’s a mouthful to get it all right.
Ixchell Reyes 28:53
All right. So it is time for our fun finds. And as you know, I have been studying Arabic again, and I just finished a level one of that class. And something that helps me stay motivated is an app. It’s not totally similar to Duolingo. I actually find it a lot better, especially for a language like Arabic. It’s the Arabia app. We’ll have to link it in the we’ll have the link in the show notes, but it takes you through a journey of places in Saudi Arabia. And as you learn the language, it’s also teaching you the culture and history of Saudi Arabia. And so that is really cool, because we all know that language and culture and history are all tied together. So it’s a free app, and it’s really well made. So Arabia’s app, Arabia,
Brent Warner 29:49
Okay, awesome. Mine is off roading. So basically I said, like, hey, you know we bought a new car. Are when we came back from Japan. And so it was just kind of time, we need to do it anyways. So we ended up buying a a 4runner, because we want to go camping and do some things like that. Toyota 4runner. But we took it out for the first time recently to go off roading very light, you know, not, a big deal. Some, just some of these paths you go out to in the desert or whatever. But it was fun, you know, like, it’s fun to kind of just get out there in nature, drive around, destroy, destroy nature with your gas guzzler. (laughter) No, I mean, going on the proper paths and doing all those things. But it was a lot of fun, you know. And so we’re wanting to do some more of that, just be away from all the digital stuff sometimes. And so I know you guys do in Saudi Arabia, there’s a lot of people running out
Ixchell Reyes 30:50
In the sand dunes,
Brent Warner 30:51
Yeah, the sand dunes and all that stuff, right?
Ixchell Reyes 30:53
Already been there, yeah, a few times, on the red sands. That’s what they do at night here.
Brent Warner 31:02
Yeah, cool. So mine is also in in support of you in Saudi Arabia, doing some off roading, doing some sand dunes.
Ixchell Reyes 31:10
Thank you. I feel that. There you go. All right, for the show notes and other episodes, check out DIESOL.org/114 You can find us on YouTube, Instagram or at DIESOLpod. And you can find us, I guess, at BlueSky as well.
Brent Warner 31:32
Yeah, we haven’t made a blue sky account yet. No, we haven’t for DIESOL. We could make it DIESOL.org so maybe I’ll work on that. Yeah, yeah. You can find me at @BrentGWarner and at Blue Sky at @BrentGWarner.com
Ixchell Reyes 31:46
you can find me @Ixy_Pixy, that’s I-X-Y underscore P-I-X-Y, if you’re looking for me on blue sky, then I’m IXYPIXY, no. Underscore.
Brent Warner 31:57
That’s it, everybody. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to the DIESOL podcast, and we’ll see you next time around.
Ixchell Reyes 32:03
See you soon. Bye.
What’s the buzz about BlueSky? Should you join the migration from Twitter?
In this episode, Brent and Ixchell explore BlueSky, the emerging social media platform educators are flocking to. Reflecting on Twitter’s past and this promising alternative, they dive into BlueSky’s potential for professional networks and classroom impact. Whether you’re curious about its decentralized structure or how it stacks up for educators, this episode will guide you through the ins and outs of this new digital space.
Tune in to learn:
- Why educators are moving from Twitter to BlueSky.
- BlueSky’s unique features, including moderation and data portability.
- How to build your Professional Learning Network (PLN) on this new platform.
- Tips on finding and joining BlueSky educator communities.
Notes
- How to Bluesky – Christian Sinclair
- Interview with Bluesky CEO, Jay Graber
- Deck.Blue – Similar to TweetDeck
Education Hashtags
There are a LOT of hashtags to follow out there, but these few will get you started if you consider yourself a member of the DIESOLcrew
Lists
- Larry Ferlazzo’s ELL Teacher’s List
- Anna Mills AI in Writing/Education/Policy
Fun Finds
- Ixchell – Arabius App
- Brent – Off-Roading