Using Twitter in Classroom

  

 

Nowadays, Twitter is not just a social network where people get to share their lives to a new-dimension of learning and teaching platform. If you are a teacher and interested in using twitter for your class, the following article will help you a lot because it contains both what to do with twitter and how to do it well: <Teachers Guide to The Use of Twitter in Classroom>

Here are some of my ideas and why they are meaningful about using twitter for teaching.

 

1)     Enhancing learner autonomy, cooperation and negotiation by sharing the questions.

Many times, students are reluctant to ask questions or answer questions in public – the whole class. Print material or website can typically be one-way but twitter is interactive inherently. Using twitter allows students to ask questions more freely than classroom environment both because it is easy to raise questions and they can have time to prepare questions or answers when they work individually on twitter. Of course, teachers can monitor and help the question-and-answer process. By doing this, learners can seek their own knowledge just they would do in their outside-of-classroom environment.

 

2)     Facilitating group projects through twitter.

Sometimes, students cannot actively participate the assigned group activity because they physically cannot get together or they are not ready to work together. Using twitter allows them to share various types of data and their opinion more easily than off-line group work. Keeping track of what they have worked is also easy and, thus, lessons some students’ work load to record their work.

 

3)     Communicate with peers and experts on twitter.

 Several years ago, I joined a teachers’ community to share class material and opinions on our class. However, using the website was not simple because there are too many website that we have to keep up with on a regular basis. By using twitter as a social bookmarking, we can communicate or follow with other educators more freely without having to check different website. In addition, sharing information with other educators can be much meaningful because much of today’s class material contains video or sound media and you can just click the link on twitter.

 

<Review of Video Clip “21st CenturyEducation in New Brunswick, Canada”>

 

When was the last time you used a pay phone?

     – many things that we don’t realize about students

  

When was the last time you used a pay phone? And the last time you sent a film to be developed? This video shows a lot of things we, as educators, might miss about the students and society of today. This was originally to promote the educational changes the New Brunswick Community intend to make but it also has many significant points for any educators in the world.

The first unique impression of this video, compared to the video clip “A Vision of K-12 Students Today” that has similar message was that this one uses more delightful way to show the message including bright music and active animated images that interest its viewers. It contains many meaningful messages include:

-Changes in our society

-Changes in class in relation to using modern technologies

-What the modern schools should be like

-How the modern learners uses technology to gain, create and share knowledge

-What changes we can bring about to enhance young learners’ learning and knowledge-based activities online

-What important skills the 21^st century learners needed for their career

-How we can provide the technology-rich environment for students

 

  The message it shows was quite simple and well-supported by various data and images. As I mentioned above, the best part of this video was how they approach to the topic. Considering the topic they deal with in the video, using creative design and images along with various animation effect and bright music seem to work well to many viewers. Whoever sees this video might feel what is needed clearly, I believe.

Teach Me to Think ...

Teach Me to Think

      Review of Video Clip “A Vision of K-12 StudentsToday”

 

  Many people around the world argue that education needs to be changed. But not many people seem to have the answer of how it should be changed. This video clip seems to have at least one way of the change.

There are many teachers who feel using technology in classrooms could be dangerous since it distracts students’ attention on what they REALLY studying and I was one of them. This video mainly shows how important the information processing skills are important in the society the students will live in and the society they belong to today showing the statistics of modern kids.

Even though we live in an information society where processing and creating information is our primary condition of all social behaviors, many educators might feel the knowledge in their textbook is the bible they should stick to and, therefore, reading should be recommended than any other activity using various technologies. They seem to miss the point that the students today spend more hours per week playing computer game, texting, blogging, and involving other form of information technology than reading books. It is not about how you can be benefited from using this technology. Rather it is about how we have our kids think, communicate and create using various technologies because, whether we like it or not, technology has become an essential part of the life of today’s kids.

Considering the amount of time they spend online, the variety of work they do or will do, one of the main roles schools are endowed to do is teaching students how to use technology properly because that is what schools are for. This is the message that the video clip is trying to tell to people, especially to educators. As long as we regard technology in education as taboo, the message a child was holding in this video -- “Teach me to think” will never be put down.