A few days ago, I introduced the explosively-popular micro-blogging tool Twitter to my Web 2.o class. Upon creating accounts, downloading TweetDeck, and toying with our settings, we began down the micro-blogging path exploring Twitter's usefulness.
I relayed the importance of developing a quality community of followers and the equally important task of who the students should follow. I recommended politicians, some celebrities, sports starts, companies, and the like. Students then went on to find their own, some more useful than others (I suppose that's the point for them, though, to customize Twitter for their own liking). I was surprised when students found other teachers on campus (only because I could not imagine these "old-timers" using Twitter!) and was amazed at their ability to be completely engaged with the task-at-hand.
Today's Twitter experiment involved students tweeting education-related articles from the Internet. Their instructions were to find a relevant article pertaining to education, utilize TweetDeck to shorten the URL, and to tweet the article with a short description, all while including our class hashtag.
Here are some of the more interesting articles:
2 Year Study to Learn What Makes Teachers GoodNext class we'll be attempting Twitter Polls via twtpoll.com, stay tuned!
CollegeQuad - College Tweets
U.N. Position Paper on Technology
Why is Education so Important?
Listening to Music Helps Students be More Productive
Follow Mr. Dooley on Twitter, @MrDooley.
This is useful to see in "print." Did you have any concerns about the Twitter interface itself, for instance the list of trending topics, or the spam followers who are sure to show up on the student accounts? To what are the student Twitter accounts tied.. a personal or a school e-mail address?
ReplyDeleteNo concerns really in regards to the Twitter interface. We covered Internet Safety extensively, so the students grasp the severity of what they put on the Internet and the implications that come along with it. We also covered the freedom of speech concerns and the content that they could come across (and its inherent lack of appropriateness). They were warned to stay away from this "undesired" content and to block the Twitter accounts (including those of ANY person that they did not know). This will obviously diminish the positive affects of using Twitter for their education, but as I always say, better safe than sorry.
ReplyDeleteThe student Twitter accounts are linked to their Google school site email so they can monitor (almost in live-time) who is following them.