Saturday, March 6, 2010

Twitter in Education

I teach gifted and talented to 3rd, 4th, 5th, & 6th graders. Presently, I don’t have Twitter set up for classroom use, as it is not allowed by our Board of Education. Twitter could be a valuable tool to any classroom teacher as it will involve student interaction. Students get excited about social media...so, my thinking is...why not use something they are excited about to enhance their learning experience in the classroom. I see many ways in which twitter would be valuable in my classroom.


• An announcement board

•Students could tweet about the day’s events

•Twitter is also a good way to send out extra information as you find it without filling up your students' inboxes with links. You can tweet links to news stories, important websites, or even the Twitter profiles of political leaders. You can even use URL-shortening services like TinyURL or Is.gd to create a compact version of your link so you can use the rest of your characters to give a short description.

•Twitter breeds the ability to communicate in short, meaningful bursts. It forces people to be concise and to get right to the point. This is an important skill to cultivate and assignments on Twitter give students the opportunity to work on this ability.

•Encourage collaboration and peer feedback. Post a link or a question for students to respond to together using @replies (Twitter's system of responding to a single person) or #trends (Twitter's system of grouping a group of tweets under the umbrella of a keyword). This will capitalize on the things learned in the lesson and continue active learning beyond the classroom.

•Use your Tweets to share information like:

◦the weather in your part of the world

◦what you are teaching/learning in class

◦to ask other classes questions

◦share special days

◦post links to fun web-based activities

◦write short poems

◦shared writing/shared reading

◦start book conversations

◦we can use Twitter apps like Twitpic to share pictures, etc.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

How do Children Benefit from Making a Podcast?

When children make podcast, they get many advantages, for example: they get a potential audience of thousands for their work.  Literacy skills (writing scripts, setting up interviews etc), are strengthened also, which allows children to develop and practice their speaking and listening skills, teamwork strengthening, etc...

Teachers can also make their podcast (and students podcast) can be interactive, where the audience can be invited to send their comments, giving valuable feedback to the children about their work.

 The ideas on what to do for a podcast is endless: school news - a great way of telling children and parents what is going on at your school; student work - children love sharing their work; ask them to record their own stories, or write reports about an activity they've tried at school; interviews - with members of staff, children, members of the community, and visitors to school; Music - Please be aware that you will not be allowed to use commercial music in podcast for copyright reasons. However, some artists allow their music to be played in a podcast. You can find this "pod safe" music in special directories (e.g. music.podshow.com); etc...

Using Wiki Workspace in Education

A wiki makes an easy shell for electronic portfolios where students can display and discuss their work with others.  It would also be an excellent forum for peer editing and peer feedback to help students improve their writing skills. 

A wiki could be set up for middle or high school students to brainstorm ideas for and plan science fair projects. Initially it would mostly be brainstorming, posting ideas and information to back them up. As they begin to flesh out the ideas that they are interested in, small groups might form to work on individual projects, but could still contribute ideas to other projects. The teacher can act as a facilitator by offering suggestions and asking probing questions to get students to consider particular aspects in the planning of their projects. The wiki could also be used to record and organize data, and plan eventual papers/presentations.

Elementary students could answer questions about the material and pose questions within their literacy circles. A Wiki would be a perfect way to integrate technology into thier Lit Cirles. Instead of sharing their thoughts on paper, they could post them to the wiki, respond to their peers thoughts or questions and best of all perserve this work for the next class to review at sometime during ther exploration of the same novel.