Classroom Applications of Twitter

In participating in a teacher twitter chat tonight, I think that I have established a pretty good idea of how twitter can be used to connect teachers and help to form professional connections. However, I have never had a very clear understanding of how to use twitter in the classroom and I think that I now have a better concept of precisely how to implement it.

When I was researching the topic of classroom applications of twitter, one source that I found quite helpful was Educational Technology and Mobile Learning's "A Must Have Guide on Using Twitter in Your Classroom". This article is excellent in that it gives a lot of different and specific applications for twitter in the average classroom. I always thought it would be used solely as a blog for students to react to given topics or to ask a teacher questions outside of the classroom if super motivated, but this article proved that there are many more practical applications of twitter to be explored. This guide to educational tweeting brought up an excellent point of connectivity: twitter can be used to post updates for parents and students about specific dates or information and it can be used to remind students what they learned that day or what the homework is. A teacher twitter can be a digital bulletin board that is dated and easy to track.
In addition, a teacher twitter can be a source of extra credit for students. Students can be given topics to participate in like pop quizzes or summaries where they are expected to produce a response to a provided prompt or they can participate in link-sharing where they bring information that they found on their own to the attention of teachers and classmates. The best part about a classroom twitter is that if a classroom hashtag is agreed upon, all students can track the class interaction and if a teacher re-tweets valuable contributions, students can get a running stream of what they should know.
I like that twitter, in the examples provided, gives students to show what they know, to interact with other students, to interact with their teacher, and to share found information with all. It creates a very multi-directional conversation which I think is very important in the language classroom.

Another article that I very much enjoyed is "Twitter HOTS & Establishing a Twitter Routine in the Classroom" by the Langwitches Blog. I really enjoyed this article because it organizes the information beautifully in many different diagrams that are well-organized and practical. 

The above chart, for example, is excellent in that it shows how students can get more and more involved in classroom tweeting with a spectrum that ranges from receptive to productive skills. Furthermore, this article presents the value of twitter in its ability to help establish routine in the classroom and I think that routine is one of the most essential parts of a smoothly-running classroom. This article aligns twitter use with Bloom's Taxonomy, cites an example of a classroom routine with twitter, and gives many examples of practical applications. In other words, it's gold. 

My readings for tonight have helped me to realize that the applications of twitter in the language classroom are limitless. There are many ways that I can use microblogging to connect with my students and parents and to help my students connect with each other and the world and because connectivity is such an important part of learning, knowing how to make it happen is essential!

Twitter chatting with #edtechchat

For the twitter assignment this week, I decided to join tonight's #edtechchat on twitter and I interacted with fellow students, teachers, professionals, and administrators. Although I am a semi-frequent twitterer, I have never before participated in a twitter chat, nor have I used it for educational means so this was an experience. 

What I like about the #edtechchat:

• Anybody who wants to get involved in the conversation can. There were pre-service teachers along with long-term professionals all involved in answering questions and discussing with each other.
• Twitter chat is a very interactive feature. You can favorite other peoples' tweets, re-tweet, and respond, creating a very communicative base for sharing responses and opinions.
• Twitter chat is instant. In the twitter chat, responses appear the moment they are posted so it is easy to keep track of and follow the conversations occuring.
• The chat was clearly labeled! The organization system established with a moderator and labeled Qs and As made it easy to see what everybody was responding to and what the focus of the chat was. 
• Cooperation is rampant. All users responded to one another and there was a lot of respect shown for the many individual opinions presented.
• Twitter represents modern technology. What better way for teachers to discuss educational technology than by using it?

What I do not like about the #edtechchat:

• The chat moves extremely quickly. This means that a lot of the responses disappear before I have the time to read all of them and I felt pressured to respond quickly without thinking my responses through as much as I would have liked to.
• Twitter has a character limit! I struggled with posting what I wanted without cutting out a bunch of characters and I had to delete a bit to fit the hashtag. I almost think a chat with a shorter hashtag would be better because it would buy me a few more letters for my response!

Even though I had a few frustrations, the twitter chat that I participated in featured questions such as "why does our students' future really compel the transformation of today's schools? Or does it not?", "What should digital learning look like in the classroom?" and "How should a school district support professional learning to promote the conversion to a digital classroom?". Teachers participating in this chat shared resources that I was able to favorite for later reference and I was able to express my own opinion and see how what I have to say lines up with what my colleagues believe. This chat was a bit confusing for a first time user and I think that some of my responses were not as good as they could have been because I posted before thinking out how to best say what I wanted to in 160 characters or less, but it was a really cool thing to be a part of and I can see myself using twitter in the classroom in the future.

Teacher Social Networking

          When presented with the assignment of joining a teacher social networking site, I chose Classroom 2.0 for multiple reasons. I think that what matters most in joining a site like this is the user base and I was looking for a site that had a lot of users, was frequently updated, and had people contributing about many different topics.

          Because Classroom 2.0 is about education and technology, I think that it will be an excellent complement to this course and I think that what I am able to gain from the site will help me in maintaining a modern classroom in the future. Also, I believe that because this site is for all educators and not educators within a specific content area, I will be able to gain more from it. I believe that many teacher tips are quite general so joining a network of teachers from all content areas will offer me more support than an ESL-specific group may have because there are simply more contributors.

Diigo v. Scoop.it

I would like to begin by saying that this was a venture into previously unheard of territory for me today. I had never heard of either of these sites but after checking them out, I undoubtedly know what I would and would not use and where my preferences lie. I've answered some questions about the two that are posted below and you can feel free to check out!
Oh, and it may be relevant to look at my comments in relation to the pages I made today. Feel free to check out my diigo or scoop.it!

• Can you highlight text in saved articles?
  On diigo? Yes, most certainly. On scoop.it? I don't really know that I can do anything useful with that site so I'm going to guess no.
• Can you use multiple tags?
  On diigo, yes! Scoop.it is more about grouping things than tagging them, I think. It seems less organized.
• Can others post comments on your site?
  I believe that people can comment on either of my websites by offering recommendations as they see fit and sending me more links. 
• Can you follow others?  Can they follow you?
  I can follow whoever I want on either site!
• Are you offered suggestions for related articles?
  Diigo is more of a free-for-all resource so a lot of the suggestions I get are from the web pages that I am visiting, but I can use following to get other suggestions if I please! On scoop.it I get suggestions as well but they seem to be pretty hard to fine-tune without some excessive keywording. I haven't figured out how to narrow down the websites to be useful yet.
• Would you continue to use either of these?  Which?  Why?
  I will continue to use diigo. I think that it is a useful bookmarking tool and I love that I can organize my bookmarks, that the tool is extremely easily accessed, how effectively I can annotate, and that I can access my bookmarks from any resource. This site is simple but effective and I think that it is extremely practical. I don't want to use scoop. it again. I had a very hard time finding links that actually fit my category and I think that I can do a better job finding websites for a given category by using google than by using one of my topics on this website. Once I found someone else's scoops in an unknown way through their topic, I had a much better time but I still feel that this site was unnecessarily complicated. I also got extremely annoyed that it felt it necessary to post tweets for me because I registered with twitter and did not remember to unclick the box each time.

To keep it short and simple, diigo = useful, organized, cool. Scoop.it = something that I am either not using correctly or that is simply not what I am looking for in a website.

A learner is like a...

A learner is like a resource manager. (I struggled with coming up with something creative, but I'll do my best to justify it). In the past, the resources available to students were limited and slow to receive. Students had to rely on those around them and text knowledge to obtain information and they could share it only as far as their classroom or community. Learning happened primarily in the classroom and it was limited in what was made available to the students.

However, with the multitude of technologies made available to students now, they have the ability to find resources from all over the world, pan through them and select what they want, and contribute whatever they please back into the world wide web. In his video "The Changing Nature of Knowledge", George Siemens states that "The connections [students] form with each other, the connections [students] form with databases, with other sources of knowledge is really the primary source of learning." In other words, learning is no longer about what happens in class but is instead focused on students' management of the resources around them and the networks with which they involve themselves. Students have a much more interactive role in the learning process and they have the ability to choose just how involved they wish to become and how to do so. Because the resources and networks made available to students are essentially limitless, so are learning opportunities. The connectivity of our world opens many doors to students and it is their responsibility to determine how involved they want to become in the learning process, to determine how to do so, and to make it happen.

As Siemens noted in his 2005 article: Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, "New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical." In this way, I believe that a lot of the "managing" comes into play. Students have many resources that are available to them and they know how to access each. However, what is most important is their ability to understand the value and importance of the information that they receive because learning is a life-long process and students' participation in that process is what most determines how successful in the long run.

Video Reactions

Before today, I had never seen any videos that go into depth about the use of electronics in the classroom so I had an easy time selecting videos to watch.

The first video that I focused on was "Networked Student" by Wendy Drexler. This video demonstrates how a teacher can run a classroom entirely electronically by encouraging students to find and utilize resources available to them on the internet. The student in this example found his success by combing the internet for lectures and contact information and by creating his own log of resources that would eventually pay off to another student. The idea of guiding students to learn by themselves is a beautiful idea in that it asks students to be self-educating and to learn the value of the different resources available. However, I think that this is something that would only work with very advanced students and for a short period of time. I think that one-on-one interaction and hands-on activity in a physical and not technical environment is something that should never be shed from the classroom. The idea of a class that is 2/3 online is a bit unsettling to me and I never considered myself to be a traditionalist. Also, I feel that this manner of structuring a classroom requires extremely disciplined students - I am already struggling with an online course with explicit rules because of the distractions of the internet; I can't imagine a student with a more abstract purpose getting a whole lot done without an extreme amount of dedication.
I believe that this is a great concept but that it has to be applied only occasionally and to very advanced students.

The second video that I viewed is "Classroom of Tomorrow", a more abstract film festival interpretation of what schools will look like in the future with the advancement of technology.

I think that the idea of a fully digital classroom is beautiful and that it is trendy because people believe that it shows advancement, but when I see an image of a large group of children on ipads I either assume that they are:

a.) playing games that they should not be or
b.) online shopping.
I might be a pessimist because of how I have seen ipads used thus far; the only children I have seen use them did the above two. However, I am unsure as to whether more advanced is necessarily better and I think that pen and paper note taking can be, at least for me, much more effective than typed note taking. This film was remarkable, but I feel that there is a lot of optimism involved. How can one insure that students "taking notes" on their phones are not actually texting one another? How can controls be established to keep students on task when they have a wide variety of resources available to them? 

I fully support the use of technology in the classroom but I fear that a lot of depictions of widespread usage are very optimistic. Furthermore, if the children in my classroom cannot take proper care of hardcover textbooks, is giving them an iPad the best choice? I think that iPad technology and Smart Boards and the like are wonderful, but I have to wonder exactly where they belong and where they do not in the language classroom.

Using Blogs to Meet Learning Standards

I believe that something very important to the education world is the concept of teacher sharing. I consider myself to be a creative individual and I can come up with a lot on my own for the classroom. However, each person has a specific viewpoint and set of values that allows them to create unique materials, manage their classroom, and more. All schools meet certain set objectives, but they do it in a different way. I believe that I can create great materials, effectively manage student behavior, and structure my classroom in ways that work for me, but I also believe that other people may do all of the above better. Teacher sharing enables educators to find and borrow the best ideas out there or see other practices that allow them to reflect upon and change their own. The value of seeing how someone else does it is clearly well understood, considering the importance of teacher observation in any good education program. I believe that running an accessible blog and accessing others is an excellent way in which I can share my experiences to assist other educators and read about others' experiences in a way to improve my own methods.

I have read a lot about the value of dialogue journals in articles similar to that of Joy Craft Peyton and I have wondered about how to best implement it in a classroom in a way that would be engaging for all. I have always liked the idea of classroom blogs but I struggled with ways in which I could implement them. However, I realize now that it might be effective for me as a teacher to digitize dialogue journals via blogging to make the process a bit smoother and more modern. I think that digital dialogue journals would allow students access to corrective software which would allow instant reflection throughout the writing process and that it would make dialogue journals a little easier. Regardless of their language backgrounds, most children frequently use and identify with web technology. I believe that in this way, blogging could make dialogue journals more interesting to students and it would allow back-and-forth comments to be easily created and archived. I think that "commenting" on a digital thread seems more natural than writing in a journal, turning it in, and waiting for it to come back with more comments. Blogs may increase the ease of teacher-student interaction and assist students with unarguably valuable reflection.

Some standards in my field that could be met by blogging are listed below:

Standard 3 (Grades 9-12)
Students will listen, speak, read, and write in English for critical analysis and evaluation.
Students can post reflective posts on topics in order to better analyze their own thinking and opinion.

Standard 4 (Grades 9-12)
Students will listen, speak, read, and write in English for classroom and social interaction.
Students can comment on each others' blogs in order to give feedback and further discuss recommended topics.