Before
creating a twitter account for this class, I personally thought the whole
concept of twitter was rather silly. A place for people to write down their
personal thoughts and opinions which otherwise no one would care about.
However, after talking to my students and exploring twitter through this class
I see that it potentially could be an effective learning opportunity. It turns
out that twitter is just as popular as Facebook, and there are ways to
incorporate education into that. I followed @CITEd, which gave me information
about free webinars regarding education and how to implement technology into
education. I also briefly followed @Quoraquestions, which were numerous
questions, for people to reflect upon and potentially answer. The majority of
them were related to education, some were about parenting. @Teachertoolkit is
another I followed which provided many suggestions for teachers. It provided
links to articles about education, tests, and provided examples of rubrics to
be used.
After
exploring twitter this past week I see there is serious potential for effective
ways to implement technology into the classroom. The resources provided
realistic ideas such as to incorporate a well-known hash tag (for example
#didyouknow or #history) into the comment to make connections on twitter. I
really liked the idea to communicate with parents; the example provided was the
vocabulary terms. This is a great way to communicate daily with parents and
keep them well informed about what their students learned each day. The
assignments asking students to use 140 characters to tell a story or to
estimate and then use Google to determine their distance to the school are
great assignments. Teachers have really embraced this wave of incorporating technology
into their daily lessons, and I now believe that twitter can be an effective
tool. In fact I have decided to create assignments, challenges, links to
articles, and facts on twitter for students to incorporate exercise and nutrition
into their daily lives. Twitter doesn’t need to be just a place for people to
write their thoughts anymore, it can be used as an effective learning tool.
