Rein in Your Information with If This Then That
Problem: I have accounts with
several social platforms, and it can
be difficult to keep up with all the
information that I wish I could read,
respond to, and archive. How can I
sort it all out?
Here’s a solution: Last year I
learned about a tool called If This
Then That ( www.ifttt.com). IFTT
allows you to set up an if/then
statement to put the internet to work
for you. Essentially, users can define
tasks such as: “If someone on
Twitter tweets a link with #edtech,
then send that tweet to my Evernote
notebook called Twitter Links.” You
can also set up statements like: “If it
is going to rain tomorrow, then text
my phone and tell me to bring an
umbrella.”
The site interfaces with many
popular social tools, such as
Blogger, Delicious, Dropbox,
Evernote, Facebook, Twitter,
Foursquare, Gmail, and many
more. There are more than 800
combinations that you and your
students can come up with to
help make the tools you use
work more efficiently for you.
For example, you can tweet out
resources you want your students
to know about using a particular
hashtag, then set up a command
that auto-creates a blog entry using
Blogger or sends an email to your
student list via Gmail. If you want to
see a video of it in action, head over
to www.bit.ly/iftttdemo.
Adam Bellow is the founder
of both edu Techer.net and
eduClipper.net as well as an
educational technologist.
He was named ISTE’s
Outstanding Young
Educator in 2011.
Tip
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