Cooperating Through Twitter

This morning I was reading a few posts on Twitter and saw a couple of opportunities to help Twitter friends. This is not an uncommon occurrence. Often I will read Twitter posts that are requests on how to do a particular task in an application, what the best brand of (dvr, mini pc, wireless router, etc) is, or to shout out a hello to new Twitter users. It is great to have such a diverse community of friends to help with these types of questions.
Twitter can help with another type of request as well. This type allows for collaboration. This is the type of request I responded to this morning, and will always respond to if I have the opportunity, because it is such a valuable contribution.
One of the requests was made by cscribner, a Twitter friend and fellow Maize technology integration consultant. He and several students from his school are working on a VoiceThread about Christmas traditions around the world. His request was to add comments to the VoiceThread about how Christmas is celebrated in the poster's country. What a wonderful way to complete a global project in a short time. In the past, students (or the teacher) would have to write letters or emails. These two methods require efforts that are unnecessary today.
The other request was from mrmayo, another educator I follow on Twitter. His students created podcasts for book reports. He was asking for people to visit his blog, listen to the podcasts and comment. What an easy thing to do! Each podcast was under two minutes long, and picking a few of them I got the gist of the assignment. I listened and posted in under 10 minutes. Back when I was fifth grade teacher, I would have loved having my students receive feedback from people around the world. Unfortunately, back then I could only go down and bribe my coworkers with a day free of recess duty to respond.
So while I joined Twitter to learn new ideas and be a "requester of information" I am pleasantly surprised to see how I can contribute!

Mathway
Mathway is a site that shows step-by-step how to solve a math problem. The problem types range from basic to calculus. Students (and their parents helping with homework) can see the steps of the problem if they forgot how to do it once at home. Teachers can use the site to reinforce the steps of a problem or to show student an alternate way to solve. Graphs can even be created from the equations. Finally a glossary of terms is available for refreshing your memory of math vocabulary.