#ILT2014 conference livetweeting reflections
In the weeks leading up to the Inclusive Learning Technologies Conference in 2014, I set an intention to take all of my notes during the conference using twitter. Here’s how it panned out:
#ILT2014 Mission:
- To take personal notes using Twitter
- To share and disseminate information to other professionals
- To build a Twitter community of professionals interested in #AssistiveTech
What devices and apps did I tweet from?
Ipad (iOS7) – I had planned to use this as my main live tweeting device. It’s relatively light, can sit on my lap, and I find it easy enough to type directly on the screen. I used both the native twitter app and Twitterific to Tweet from.
Samsung S3 phone– I discovered that I wanted to take photos of a lot of the slides this time, and I found using the ipad too slow, too big to take photos with. So I used my Samsung S3 to take photos and tweet them. I used the native twitter app, but that was too slow (it kept asking me to apply a filter – 1 step too many for me!). So I used the inbuilt camera, and then shared to twitter from there.
Macbook Air 13 inch – I hadn’t planned to use my Macbook to tweet from, more to collate Storify feeds and for blog updates. But several of the conference rooms had tables, so the macbook was a great choice in these sessions, as I could type faster. I used Tweetdeck on my Macbook.
How much did I tweet?
LOTS! And lots. In fact, I was the top tweeter for the conference….
According to Sumall.com:
916 tweets
216 retweets
272 favourites
What types of info did I tweet?
- Photos (of slides and conference fun!)
- Key points form presentations
- Storify Stories
- Coaching Tweets for new tweeters
- Supportive Tweets for new tweeters
- #ATchat
- Chatting and commenting on others tweets
Automatically saving notes
I had planned to save all my notes to Evernote, and had set this up in IFTT (see how here)
This worked, but I discovered that Evernote has an unannounce restriction on how many notes can be sent in an hour form IFTT (30). If you exceed this, IFTT will suspend the recipe for the entire day! I received several email notices that I was close to the limit, or had exceeded it. Luckily all my tweets saved in Evernote, but I couldn’t take the risk that my recipe wouldn’t work.
I changed the recipe to send all my tweets to Google Drive, and this worked with no issues at all.
What would I do differently next time?
- I need a better way of being able to follow back new followers – It was hard to keep up with hundred of tweets and mentions flowing through my twitter account, plus actually paying attention to the conference.
- I wish I had set up send links to Google drive, so I could retweet all the amazing resources I was sharing, so I could look back later.
- Tweeted photos were saved as links – not helpful as many of them were actually photos of slides with important points!
I’ll be blogging more livetweeting insights in the coming weeks, including my actual workflows, so stay tuned!