In this week's blog post assignment, I was thrilled to find out that I was supposed to create an assignment that dealt with my particular field of teaching. While we are all learning the fundamentals of technology use in modern classrooms, I do feel that it is important to be getting ideas together NOW that will benefit us in our specialized fields when we are actual educators. After all, we'll be there before we know it, right?
Although this idea may seem small and simple, I thought that it would be great for class discussions. My major is secondary education in English/language arts, and the idea that I'm going to share is about using Twitter to create class discussions and debates on whatever book, poem, short story, or play that we are reading at the moment. This idea came from a YouTube video that I found on Pinterest entitled "Social Media and Technology in the Classroom". In this video, Mr. Cassidy's literature class stay actively engaged in class debates each week thanks to the use of Twitter and the usage of cell phones. Mr. Cassidy not only gives assignments through tweeting and incorporates the usage of hash tags, but he tweets questions regarding each literature assignment via Twitter. In class, he projects the tweets on a SMARTBoard and, by using their cell phones, allows the students to respond to questions and express their interpretations of each piece of writing. This way, all the students are involved in the class discussions and are enjoying themselves while learning about literature.
I do realize that this may appear to be a very elementary idea to some of you, but I thought that it was a great way to incorporate technology, even if it is in a small way, into the classroom and engage the minds of students who would probably otherwise be sleeping in class. Even though we have used Twitter in EDM 310, we never used it in the way that Mr. Cassidy's class did, so here we are with a brand new lesson for this class!
To use this lesson in the future of EDM 310, there are a few steps that Dr. Strange should follow. First of all, after everyone has created their Twitter account, I would pick a familiar piece of literature (Hamlet, The Odyssey, Emily Dickinson poems; it doesn't matter) and have everyone read it by a certain date. I would then go to the EDM 310 Class Blog page and make a post telling everyone that I would be tweeting a list of discussion questions pertaining to whatever we were assigned to read. I would tell them to tweet their responses to the questions using the hash tags #edm 310 and a hashtag of the name of the reading assignment. Afterwards, I would schedule another in-class meeting, and by using the SMARTBoard, I would show the questions along with the replied tweets of each student. I would also allow them to tweet whatever questions or comments they had while in class and we would discuss everything then. This would not only get students interested in the assignments, but it would also help them to become thinkers on their own. I would even have them make a reflection tweet or blog post about the reading assignment when they are finished so that I would know that they participated and fully understood their assignment.
Once again, I know that this is not the most creative idea when it comes to technology in the classroom. However, it does deal with my field of expertise, and it would be fun to see how other EDM 310 students would respond to it. This is an idea that I could see myself doing with my English classes one day, and I hope that Dr. Strange decides to give it a chance one day in his class, as well.
This sounds like an interesting idea, Kelli! I like that it involves people thinking about your course outside of the classroom and then uses a kind of poll analysis to see what everyone else tweeted! For EDM310, I would keep it strictly to short stories or poems and about educators and their technology, but otherwise, great idea!
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