Ten Ways Twitter is Changing Lectures
I love stuff like this. I grew up in the great era of the lecture. That's how I learned just about everything in high school, especially history.
And like most of my classmates, I wasn't all that engaged. I was day dreaming a lot or sneaking in a few pages of the Stephen King novel I happened to be reading at the time (I remember Mom being horrified that I had spent my time in Mr. Lundeen's science class reading Cujo) or scribbling all over my tablet.
I was anything but engaged in the lecture or the knowledge that was supposedly being communicated.
I'm acutely aware of this with the lectures I give. I always try to ask a series of questions to my students (one of my flaws is that I tend to ask too many short 'yes' or 'no' response questions) to keep them engaged. I also bring my cell phone up to my podium and tell kids at any time they can text me something they want to contribute if they don't want to say it out loud.
I was impressed some time ago when I was watching a lecture entitled - ironically - "Lectures are Dead" and they professor said, "if you see someone next to you without their cell phones or laptops or other devices not on and connected to the internet point them out and tell them to get connected."
I love that.
Lately, I've been striving to use Twitter more in my classes. Two years ago when we did the Sticky-Note Book Report in College Comp II, I gave them the option to post their responses on Twitter with a specific hashtag so it was easy to keep track of, instead of just putting the Post-It Notes in their books.
To my surprise, no one took me up on it. They said the couldn't write enough on a Twitter post (talk about music to an English teacher's ears there). Then I discovered Twitlonger, which allows the Tweeter to go over the character limit of Twitter.
Still, no one opted for the Twitter route. Maybe this year.
This article states some interesting benefits of using Twitter to liven up lectures.
Here are a few of my favorites.
Students actually learn more -
Students once had to furiously scribble notes in class, but in lectures where there’s a Twitter backchannel, much of this information is now stored online. Using classroom hashtags creates an archive of each class meeting that students can reference in the future. Of course, students do still need to take notes, but now they might do so through their own Twitter feeds, or simply note keywords that they can use to search through archived tweets later.
Students can continue the lecture even after it's over -
As professors use Twitter and lecture-specific hashtags, students are able to stay in the loop on class wherever they are. Any time students log in to Twitter and see these tweets, they’re able to keep their class in mind.
And this one is my favorite: Lectures become more conversational instead of one sided -
Without Twitter, lectures are often a one-way street, with professors lecturing for about an hour, mostly uninterrupted. It’s difficult to get students to speak up in a huge lecture format, but not so with Twitter. With Twitter in the lecture hall, more students tend to not only participate in the primary discussion with the professor, but even spin off into their own intellectual conversations with classmates. This turns the one-sided lecture into a multifaceted conversation for the class.
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100 Tools for Teachers who use Twitter
There are some great apps here.
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Michelle Rhee might be gone as head of Washington DC schools, but she has surfaced as head of the non-profit Students First.
Here is their latest commercial. This should anger every teacher worth their salt.
Rhee, of course, only spent three years teaching. But her holy grail is raising student test scores, as if that ensures an education. That's what scares me about her.
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How much fun would this be as a geography assignment?
Here's the opening -
Cities are full of noise and scuffle, and they don’t always reveal their history. Armed with a fistful of maps from 1901 and a smartphone bristling with data-recording apps, one man tries to uncover a city’s secrets.
Just imagine all that has changed. Just imagine all that has been lost. And just imagine the experience you'd have.
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One of the things I love so much about the web, is the ability to find so much connected material. While I was reading this story about what it means to be 'learned,' I found a link to this TED Talk
The blogger writes about actually writing code while listening to the above TED Talk when he overhears this key line: "And this is it, right? To feel and be felt."
The line struck him and he wrote it down. It was one of those lines that seem to be full of significance, so he wrote this blog post as a result.
I love when learning happens like this. Of course, that one lines leads him to ponder what it would see like if it was applied to education, and he comes up with, "And this is it, right? To learn and be learned."
Usually, when we think of learning, we think of a teacher teaching and the students soaking it up. Then they remember what they soaked up and repeat it on a test and earn a grade.
But is that "being learned?"
He looks at the 'learned' differently. What happens when technology allows you to internalize the learning and actually grow and discover.
That leads him to an exploration of learning and how to make it more relevant to our children. He discovers these four things that are essential for "being learned" while watching his kids play games and work social networks.
1. The experiences are responsive. Games and social networks engage students in experiences that are interactive. You can't play Skyrim, for example, and not have an experience that causes interaction and engagement. If you kill this person, then this happens. If you choose this path, then this leads to these events. How often does an experience like that occur in traditional classes?
2. They provoke conversation. One must talk and listen and converse in order to succeed. How can you use Facebook, for instance, if you don't converse with someone. I mean that's the whole point of Facebook. Even if you don't update your status or respond to someone else or message someone or like a picture, you are still having a conversation about something on Facebook. Even if it's just turning to your wife and saying, "Can you believe that person put that on Facebook?" or even if it leads you into a talk with your children about what is appropriate or inappropriate to put on Facebook and the ramifications that it might have.
3. These experiences inspire personal investment. When the first two factors are evident, they lead to the third experience: personal investment. It's not like apps or games are all that different than grades in school, after all they award badges or updates (think of Farmville). Yet, they are able to get young people (and older folks too) to personally invest their own time and effort into the game or app. Every teacher I know, me included, lament this about education: if only the kids worked harder or were interested or found this meaningful, then they would get so much more out of it. And that's true. But as teachers we need to make sure that the first two experiences are there before this third one can happen.
4. These “native” learning experiences are guided by safely-made mistakes. Game players must make mistakes and learn from them and re-evaluate and adapt and grow and apply what they learn to something they find meaningful and important. The blogger asks, how often does this happen in the real world? (all the time). Yet, how often does this really, genuinely occur in school? Do students learn the subject of a sentence because of these things? Do students learn where Europe is because of these things? Or is this 'artificial' type of learning only occur in school?
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Since the previous post had a TED video in it, here is another video I came across via an NPR podcast I was listening to on the way to school yesterday. It features Salman Khan. You might have heard of him and his website, Khan Academy.
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You Didn't Build That Alone
This is an interesting blog post. One perfectly applicable to teachers.
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And here is more on Khan academy and how some classes are using it.
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