Effective Use of Twitter in the Classroom

On the suggestion of my Integrating Technology professor, this week I visited high school English Starr Sackstein's blog, specifically the post 12 Tips for Using Twitter in the Classroom. I was immediately interested in the post because Ms. Sackstein works in a high school English classroom, and English is my area of interest. I also happen to be a pretty big fan of Twitter, so I was thrilled to see two of my passions combined in one post!

I really like the way that Ms. Sackstein describes Twitter as "micro-blogging" - what an apt description! What Ms. Sackstein has done is essentially embraced her students' natural enthusiasm for Twitter, and found a way to harness that enthusiasm and put it to use in her classroom. Each week, she directs students to an article online and then asks that they participate in a chat about the article on Twitter, posting their own comments and also replying to their classmates' comments.

In this way, this teacher has engaged her students and put them in charge of their own learning. She has identified something that her students have a natural passion for, and found a way to integrate that into her curriculum. She simultaneously teaches students the content area knowledge that she needs to cover and increases their literacy by teaching them about the basics of interacting via Twitter.

I love the idea of taking class discussions to Twitter, because I can really see how that would spark students' interest in participating in the discussion.

Have you ever used Twitter in your classroom? Would you consider using it in this way?

Working with Animoto

I spent some time over the last two weeks learning how to use Animoto, and I was happy to discover that it is every bit as intuitive as it appears. I was able to teach myself how to use it very quickly, and it was easy to create a simple video. I would feel confident asking students in middle school or high school to create their own videos using Animoto.

The most challenging aspect of the whole endeavor was finding "free to use and share" pictures to include in the slideshow. Prior to our class discussion last week, I never knew that I could filter Google Image results by the image's licensing requirements. I did that when searching for images to use in this Animoto. It definitely limited my results, but it was nice to know that I wasn't stealing someone's images! 

I also felt that the available music was fairly limited - although one of the options happened to work well for my video, in the future I see myself uploading music from my own personal library to use. 

Depending on the topics of my future Animotos, I might consider incorporating some images of my own, even if it meant going out and taking pictures specifically for that purpose.

Here is the Animoto that I created, which is meant to be a simple introduction to the book The Hunger Games.

Have you ever used Animoto before? Have you asked students to use it? How did that work out?

Diving Into Diigo

http://edudemic.com/2010/07/5-new-diigo-features-you-should-know-about/

Diigo is a social bookmarking site similar to Pinterest. Its purpose is essentially to store things you might want to go back to in the future. It is a cleaner, more efficient way of "bookmarking" various sites so that when you want to find something later, you don't encounter an endless sea of text.

So far, I have mixed feelings about Diigo. One the one hand, I absolutely love the ability to highlight certain parts of a page, or to place a sticky note somewhere. It's nice to be able to add titles, labels and descriptions.

However, I tend to prefer the visual aspect of Pinterest. I know that some people feel that it's easy to lose track of pins. I find that I avoid this by creating many very specific boards rather than just a few general ones. Instead of "recipes" I might have "breakfasts", "appetizers", and "desserts", for example. This makes it much easier to go back and find things that I have pinned. My only complaint with Pinterest is that I sometimes struggle to choose which board to pin something to. A certain cake recipe might seem to fall under both "desserts" and "party ideas", but I dislike cluttering up my boards by pinning one pin in multiple places. In this area, the labels feature of Diigo is a big help.

I do think it is possible that I might still be on a bit of a learning curve with Diigo. I will definitely keep using Diigo, and see if my opinion changes over time.

For anyone who is interested, feel free to peruse my diigo library.

Have you ever used Diigo or Pinterest? how do you think the two compare?

New Literacy: What IS It?

http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/130613/

New literacies are basically new forms of literacy, created by advancing technology, which increase the many ways in which we can communicate with one another. As technology moves forward, our literacies broaden and change to reflect these new forms of communication.

In order to communicate effectively, we have to have at least a superficial knowledge of these new technologies. We should have at least a high level understanding of what a blog is, how Twitter and facebook and text messaging work. If we want to prepare our students to function effectively in the world outside of school, we need to find ways to teach them these new literacies.

NETS for Students are a set of standards which essentially measure the skills that students now need in order to learn and function successful in an increasingly digital environment.

NETS for Teachers, then, are a set of standards which measure the skills that teachers need in order to teach successfully in the same technologically advanced environment.

In many ways, teachers can learn these new technologies right alongside their students. One particularly effective approach might be for a teacher to create and manage a classroom blog. The teacher could regularly post about upcoming assignments, tests, and field trips so that students can read the blog from home and be aware of upcoming events. The teacher could also invite each student to write "guest posts" for the blog, which other students in the class could comment on, thus allowing for meaningful class discussion outside of the classroom. In this way, a single blog would allow an entire class of students to connect with one another as well as their teacher, without even being physically present in the classroom.

Do you think a classroom blog is an effective way of teaching new literacies?