Trialling Twitter

 

 

 Sourced from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniella-gibbs-leger/dont-mess-with-black-twitter_b_3797870.html

 

This week we explored the digital system of Twitter which was a new field for me. I did not have a Twitter account nor did I really know how it worked so I started from scratch and created one.  Firstly you needed to come up with a Username which should be simple except that every one I tried was already in use by the millions of other Twitter followers.  Eventually I settled on a name with a range of letters and symbols in it which I should have written down as next time I went to log on unfortunately I could not remember it and had to reset by account, which was an unexpected hurdle. All of this aside when I was finally on Twitter I was able to explore and gain a sense of how it worked.  The posts needed to be small, a maximum of 140 characters and this small message sent out was called a 'tweet.' As you set up your account you were prompted to select interests in many fields including travel, music, health and food, once these were selected you automatically added a whole range of groups or individuals across these fields and they could choose to add you as friends.  If they added you, you could view their posts and the posts of their followers. 

 

This week we are asked to use Twitter to post about the ways in which children learn using technology.  In terms of posting on this topic I found it very challenging to say what I wanted to in 140 characters or less however, this forced me to draw out what the key ideas were and make it very to the point.  After my third attempt I decided on - "children need to learn through exploring, they need to be exposed to the different technology platforms through play to learn!"  I then ended this tweet with the #EDCU12039 so that others would be able to search the courses hash tag and my post would come up.  I learnt that the hash tag is a linking device so if someone posts something and hash tags it and I search for that particular hash tag such as EDCU12039 I can see every other person who has used that in their post.

 

The next element to explore was how could technology such as Twitter or TodaysMeet (safer school version of Twitter) be used in the classroom with students.  My initial thoughts were - Twitter and social media in a primary school classroom? How could this be useful?  But after thinking about it and researching ways it could be used I've decided it could be a very beneficial digital tool and here is why:

• Every student is able to contribute regardless of time and place (Twitter homework could take place at home, school or even on the bus ride home on their phones).
• It is a log of student thinking where teachers can access the classroom hash tag and see students responses in a collective space.
• It caters for the diverse needs of the classroom - those who are too shy to talk up in class may prefer posting online.
• It gives students a chance to think about their answer and have time to edit and post. (Fasso, 2015)

Therefore, I believe that social media tools such as Twitter or TodaysMeet could have a place in 21st century classrooms and may be a great way to cater for diversity, allow reflective thinking time and be able to store all students answers in a collective space.  These 'tweets' could then be accessed in the classroom on the smart board and all students answers examined collaboratively to explore their thoughts and feelings on a topic.  This would allow the teacher to discover any commonalities or prior knowledge of the students and elements they wished to explore in more depth which could assist in scaffolding an appropriate learning program for a topic.