Twitter and Blogs in Education

Normally when people think of online social media, such as Twitter, they will not automatically think of it as an educational tool. Blogs may have an easier time of being accepted as an educational tool, but usually they carry the feeling of being used only for personal uses. Today, I am going to give my thoughts as to how I think Twitter and Blogs can be helpful in teaching and how they can be a hindrance. I will also talk about how I as a teacher can use my website to be student and even parent friendly.

The first article I read is titled 50 ways to use twitter in the classroom. As I was reading through this article I agreed with several of the ways Twitter could be used. Others I thought were almost ridiculous ways for Twitter to be used in the classroom. Then there were others I thought had their usages, but as to whether they would belong in the classroom I was not sure of.

The ones I liked dealt with the actual class assignments. You can remind students how much time they have left for papers or presentations. Also, you can make quick changes to the syllabus and tell the entire class at a moments notice. The ones I thought were ridiculous dealt with things such as planning a field trip or allowing the parents to have access to the classroom every few hours by Tweeting what is going on. The ones I thought were ok dealt with more personal tastes. These included some of the games, which I understand are good lesson reinforces, but to have them on Twitter is a little much in my opinion.

Three ways I really liked how Twitter could be used was in asking questions, writing reviews, and summarizing. I can use these three uses in my teaching. I can use Twitter to ask my class a question concerning a social issue that has risen within the last few hours and have them attempt to relate that issue to a character from a reading or a situation surrounding a poem. My students can use Twitter to write a review of a poem or the certain pages they had to read and communicate how they understood the reading. They can also write a review as a topic exploration for an essay. At the end of each lecture, I can have my students type a summary of what they took away from the class period. They can also ask a question that can be used in the next class period for further discussion. Twitter usage in the classroom will change the environment to help students learn better by having an avenue they are already accustomed to in a school-related setting. In todays society, a large majority of people have a Facebook and Twitter account. Utilizing Twitter in a school setting will bring a bit of comfort to students.

The second article I read is titled 15 awesome ways to to use blogs in your classrooms. Reading through this article and finding a way it could apply to my classroom was a little harder to do. It might have been the layout of the article itself or it could have been the options which were given. I had to spend time critically thinking about the type of situation each blog idea could be used in.

The types of blogging I think would not work so well would be a blog for problem solving or the class compendiums. In English classes, I personally do not see any type of problems which will need to be solved. Therefore devoting an entire blog to solving problems would be a waste of my time. Having my students working together to write summary posts which will later create a study guide for each exam does have an appealing nature to it. I think that creating an exam review online where anyone can come along and use at a later date for another class would be cheating. Therefore, this would be almost unworthy of creating.

Of all of the ways blogs can be useful and work well, the three I would be willing to use would be: the one dealing with illustrate and activity, having a classroom news blog, and a blog where students could meet the author of a certain work of literature. In illustrating an activity, I can use a blog to illustrate how a student is to compose a research paper or create a PowerPoint Presentation. The assignment can be blogged in a step-by-step fashion, or even a picture-by-picture process. Having a blog dedicated entirely to relating news concerning the class is a wonderful use of technology. Each post contains whatever is newsworthy for the students in the class. Finally, the last blog usage I would like to use is one reserved entirely to learning the background information of the author of the works of literature we are studying at that time. Each blog post can be filled with the main information of the lifetime of each author. If we spend a long period of time on one in particular, I can create several post. One for the basics; birth and death dates, works most noted for, major milestones for the author in their life, and their family life. Another can be dedicated just to describing how many works the author wrote, the major division of their works, such as poems and short stories, and what inspired them to write each type of work. Using blogs in the classroom will change the environment and help students learn better by giving them an second place for information and a safety net for paper requirements.

As a teacher in the 21st Century I have an online website which has information for my classes and information on how to reach me for any personal questions. Using this website as a teacher, I can upload different lessons and assignments to a certain area for each class. I will be able to know where they are and be able to have access to them whenever I need them. Also, I can gather information from my students and their parents and be able to organize each piece of information. For friendly access for my students and parents, I can make my site easy on the eyes, easy to navigate, and interaction with the site itself will be painless. I can make the site easy on the eyes by not using contrasting color combinations, organizing the the information in a uniformed manner, and use a minimal amount of words. Straight and to the point is better than long cleaver paragraphs. My site can be easy to navigate with every link clearly marked and defined as to where the link is going. Also, each page will be clearly visible from the sidebar. Finally, the interaction with the site can be painless because it has been easily defined as to where every assignment is located and labeled and the eyes will not be strained due to strange color usage.

Twitter and Blogging. They have their usefulness inside and outside of the classroom. Twitter can be used for quick updates or changes in the class schedule or assignments. Blogs can be utilized for sharing news and providing step-by-step instruction for an assignment which may be tricky. Finally, websites have a usefulness not only for educators but for parents and students as well.

Utilizing Technology in the Classroom

Technology inside of a classroom. Is there any real use for technology in a school? How can teachers use technology in a positive light with all of the information which is now to every person in the world. What type of technology is available for teachers to best teach their students without being cut out of the equation completely. Do I already use some of these tools in my everyday life, or are there other tools and techniques I need to learn how to use and utilize?

According to Bernie Poole's article What every teacher should know about Technology, every teacher should have an understanding of six different areas of technology. They are as follows: Productivity Tools, Troubleshooting, Technical assistance, Web Resources, Search Skills, and Interest and Flexibility.

As I read this article, I found that three of the areas already listed I have already been doing at at this time. They are the Productivity Tools, Troubleshooting, and Technical Assistance. The Productivity Tools are items such as Word, Excel Spreadsheet, and PowerPoint Presentations. I am able to utilize these tools in school related activities in high school and college. The Troubleshooting area of technology I am familiar with for similar things have already happened to me and I have dealt with them before. Such as my computer freezing and the only what to get it to “melt” or unfreeze would be to turn it off and start if up again. Finally, the last area I am good at and have had some experience in is the Technical Assistance. I know several different people who are tech savvy. I trust them completely when it comes to my computer and other devices when my devices do not work well.

While reading this article I found three areas I need to work at and grow in. They are: Web Resources, Searching Skills, and Interest and Flexibility. In the Web Resources, I am yet to grasp just how many  sites there are for teachers to use. Before I started to leisurely look at the different apps for Apple products, I had no idea the magnitude of teaching and other educational applications there are just in the Apple app store alone. My mind is blown away by just thinking of the multitude of other resources on the web that is available for teachers to use which I have yet to become aware of. In the area of Searching Skills, mine are adequate, but when it comes to searching for teaching resources, I am in need of work. I have been able to get on Google and type in the relevant information I was unable to find elsewhere, but I have no real skills when it comes to searching for sites which pertain to my teaching with in a classroom. This is one of, if not the biggest area of growth I need to work in. As to the Interest and Flexibility, I have an interest in finding good resources for teaching. Flexibility wise, I am willing to take the time to search for finding the good resources and trustworthy teachers to ask them questions.

Jose Bowen from SMU talks about technology inside and outside of the classroom in this interview. Bowen talks of several different ways to use technology outside of the classroom which helps enhance the dialogue of his classes. This may be in sending a tweet to his class about a real world problem which just happened and he asks the class on Twitter if it has any bearing on the reading they had in class that day. If I were to use this sort of scenario in my classroom, I would probably have more of a student led discussion than me asking a few questions which are easy in that they do not involve thinking critically about what they have just read. This will change my teaching method in that I will have to pose these questions using technology instead of asking them face-to-face. Yes, this is a good thing, asking them face-to-face, but sometimes in order to get the students to really think and analyze critically I may have to ask the questions using technology while not in class. Doing it this way will indeed bring more face-to-face interaction while class is in session and not have all of us plastering our faces to a screen.

When Jose Bowen talked about teaching naked he meant that if you have a strength in lecturing, you go ahead and lecture. If this is not your strong suit, then you can use a podcast or YouTube video in which another teacher, from Yale for instance, will do the lecturing for you. By doing this, the I as a teacher am able to spend more time interacting with the students rather than lecturing to them. Students need to be willing to have those face-to-face interactions with their teachers when they teach naked.

Whether it be mastering a technological requirement for teaching or how I use that particular technique has a large impact on the students who come into my classroom. The method I use the technology for will have to be relevant to how it will best teach my students. This will be in teaching them how to think critically and analyze the information in a way only technology can provide.

Online Learning

Online learning has grown in popularity. What is up with it really? What makes online classes so attractive? In this post I have explored four different types of online learning. Each type of online learning has either been tested and proven to increase the percentage of retained material over a long-term period of time, or it deals with how long it will take before education is completely online, or finally, deals with how online learning can be and is integrated into the classrooms we know them as now.

60 MINUTES on CBS has a segment about online learning for K-12. It is called Khan Academy. Sal Khan started this online academy in 2009. This academy has 3,800 videos ranging from basic math to physics, history, and biology. These videos are 10-15 minutes long, and deal with one topic in a certain content. This free source of education is extremely helpful. The teacher can assign a certain video, along with problems dealing with that video, and be able to go around and individually help the students who need help based on how long it took them to complete each problem and help them figure out how to solve each problem quickly and correctly the first time.

According to EPIC 2020, the physical universities we know now will only be available to the rich and sports teams. The campus will contain luxury suites, gourmet meals, and a large social atmosphere. The sports will be an addition to these accommodations. Online learning at the college level will be the dominate path of instruction. Face-to-face interaction will be obsolete when it comes to the classroom. The learning will be done online in scenarios as in the next example.

TED has a video in which a Ph.D, Daphne Koller, discusses online education. The online classes will start on a certain date, end on a certain day and in-between you will have real homework due at a certain time. At the end of the class you will receive a certificate stating you have completed the required work for that class. You can then show this certificate to the university or college you are attending and be able to not have to take that class there. Also, your future employers can see that you have indeed taken that class. She goes on to stress about practical learning in the classes. You only watch the videos you need and or want to watch, you engage in the lesson by answering questions dealing with the concept which has been taught. You will not be able to continue until you get the right answer.

Apple has an app called iTunes U in which you can write your own textbook for your class. This can be used in any classroom setting; K-12, college, or university. Your students can be added to the class list which the book is used for. Then, your students will have access to all of the materials you are using for the course right on their iPad. All of their notes are collected into one place; notes from videos, lectures, and even about a book. Assignments for the class are put into a list and the students can check off each task as they complete it.

So, online learning; does it still hold the same fascination? Has the attractiveness gone from that of an interesting idea to something we all wish was available at this time? Hopefully this post has answered a few questions about online learning. I also hope that this post has posed a few questions which will lead you in a direction which will help you make discoveries make you learn online.

Message Content and Copyright

At first glance, these two topics seem to not have anything in common. Message content is defined, in my words, as being the important information that is put into a lesson and then taught on in the classroom. I am going to assume that everyone knows the main concept behind the meaning of the word copyright. In this blog post, I am hopefully going to tie these two “worlds” together in the light of how they both affect teachers.

In most school room settings, teachers limit their lessons on an objective for the grade they are teaching. An example of this may be  a teacher creates a list of the answers to the test because that is all the students needs to know. There are several issues and challenges that effect what teachers teach. An issue is going beyond this concept of intentional teaching. The above example is a case of intentional teaching. There are other things we need to teach in the classroom outside the main reasons, i.e, English. As a teacher, I will need to teach my students how to think critically and how to make the real-world applications on their own. I can aid them in doing this by giving them the skills to recognize how to make each subject applicable to the real-world. Also, I can give them the attitudes to be positive even when the situation is not the best. Finally, I can give them the best opportunities to learn how to develop research strategies which will help them in every aspect of their work and personal life.

A challenge for teachers is copyright. In this paragraph I am going to talk about three things I personally did not know about copyright. I found these items interesting for I had never really research what the details of copyright entitled. The first item I will discuss is the date the work was created and the expiration date for the copyright. According to the article, What is Copyright Protection, copyright starts when the work is created and put into a physical form people can touch. It is usually the best option to back up your work on a cd or an external hard drive and put it in a safe environment. When the work is created, the author will put their name and the year the work was created on the work. The date is when you actually save your work to a hard drive or to that safe environment—this is the date of creation. An example of copyright would be as follows: Copyright © 2010 John Doe. The expiration date for copyright is 50 years after the death of the author for a written work and 25 years after the death of the photographer for a photo or movie. The article, 10 Big Myths about Copyright, has a myth buster about charging for copyright. Even if you were not charged when you used something that was copyrighted, it is still stealing. Music is exempted from the copyright violation. This leads us into the fair use determinations. Sometimes fair use depends on the involvement of money. The fair use determination has four factors which are to be the basis of whether or not using something is fair. These four factors are found at the Dese Copyright Page. The best route to go if you want to use something that is copyrighted is to ask permission from the owner for access to their material if you don’t want to have to deal with the four factors. As a teacher, I believe that I need to be very careful about what I use and don’t use. When it comes to copyright laws, I am required to obey them. The question is, will I? I honestly hope I will. But there may be times when I will totally ignore them or go somewhere in-between the lines. Why is copyright such a big deal? I know that I would not like other people using my hard earned work for their own. Copyright is a way of protecting those who worked hard for a certain work. As a teacher, if I do not follow any of the laws of copyright I may very well lose my legal ability to teach.

In my classroom, message content and copyright are going to be big challenges to have to deal with. I will have to make sure that my message content is both intentional and unintentional. Preparing the students in my care to be able to properly develop the life skills which are required by my classroom. Also, I must make sure I am meeting this goal by not following any of the copyright laws. Therefore, Message Content and Copyright are relevant to the classroom and are defiantly interdependent of each other.

Teaching with Content Curation

Content curation is a concept used by teachers to gather resources online, chose the resources most relevant to the lesson, and ultimately the class as a whole, and put them in a safe and usable area for their students to use at a later date. The students use these sites as part of their lesson because the teacher shared the sites with the students. Material is not created in this process, the information is simply gathered and then presented in a logical fashion.

In the article I read about this topic, entitled Teaching with Content Curation, the featured teacher, Hauna Zaich, browsed the internet for different sites dealing with topics for her 8th-10th grade English classes. When she found such sites, she would organize them into a folder or binder online called live binders such as these examples, and later integrate these sites into her lesson plans. Not only that, but she shared each site with her students and their parents so they could use them outside of the classroom. On top of all of this, Zaich also taught the student how to search for sites on their own. The reason Zaich did this was to prepare her students for life out in the real world in the work force and in their lives in general.

In my classroom, I want to be able to utilize the live binders and content curation in different aspects of each lesson. For example, when it comes to research papers, I can look online, find the different sites which are relevant, enter them into the live binder and share it with my students. I hope that in this way, I will teach the students how to look properly and critically for the right type of information which will only help them, not hinder them.

While teaching my lessons, I will include several interactive content forms. I will have several different SMART Notebook lessons which contains six different types of multimedia. Rosetta Stone has a demo for anyone who has not yet decided if it is the way they want to learn another language. You will need to enter your email in order to continue with the demo. Rosetta Stone is incredible. They use still images and audio to help you learn what each picture is. As you continue to learn the right answers, the higher the level will go. This is a valuable way to learn. You learn at your own pace. There is the option to have a workbook to go along with whatever language you are learning.

At this time, I am going to discuss the challenges and key trends from the 2012 K-12 Horizon Report.  One of the challenges teachers are going to run into while attempting to reach digital learners is the abundance of information and relationships which come from the internet. Being able to determine whether the information that is presented is credible information is very difficult. Also, we as teachers cannot craft our lessons to be created in one way and every student be able to learn the necessary information. This means that each teacher needs to take into account each students learning style and design the lesson to fit each style of learning into it at the same time. A key trend that was touched on in the horizon report is the BYOD. This is a program called “Bring Your Own Device”. In this program, each student is asked to bring their own electronic device such as an iPod or computer from home to use at school. This allows the money given to the program to buy a device for the students who don’t already have one of their own. This cuts the amount of spending the program has to do since the budget is very low.

The challenge and key trend mentioned above effect me in certain ways. First off, I need to be able to determine how many of the online information is credible before I send my students off to learn it as truth. I am not the only teacher who has to deal with this, teachers all over the globe have to deal with this information credibility. BYOD effects me personally in the fact that my students will be using their devices to have ease in finding the books they will need for the class or writing papers that are assigned. The rest of the world has to deal with this as well because they might have to be extra careful as to how much access they allow the devices to be brought into the class.

All in all content curation is important in every aspect of life, not only in teaching. The skills we teach our students in the classroom carry over into their lives in the work force and their home life. Therefore, we need to be extra careful and fully aware at what type of information we are allowing them to have access to and how we help them to detect sites full of false information.

Visual Literacy

Visual Literacy: What is it? According to the Journals article Picture Perfect: Teaching to Visual Literacy, it is literacy using images and/or videos instead of words.

This information is a concept I unconsciously knew about but did not know how to put my finger on describing it; much less being able to integrate it into the classroom setting.

As I was reading this article, three questions came to my mind.

The first question which came to mind is what is the difference between using words and using pictures/videos?

A second question I asked myself is why do I as a teacher need to be, as they say, “one step ahead of the game” when it comes to knowing the different types of visual literacy devices that are offered?

The third and final question that arose was what would be the benefits of integrating visual literacy in my lesson plans as apposed to not using it at all?

At this time, I will give the answers to the above questions. In my answers I will add the method I would use to carry out this aspect of visual literacy.

The answer to question 1, the difference question, is simple. A picture says a thousand words all by its self. Using pictures and images brings a long list of words to the mind of the viewer. Pictures are not the only part of visual literacy available for teachers. Videos also aid in bringing the same list of words to the minds of the viewers. This can be used in a presentation, a drill-and-practice, or a discussion. The presentation and drill-and–practice are behaviorisms and the discussion is a constructivism. In the presentation, I can use a video or picture show to bring the right descriptions I wish them to learn. With the drill-and-practice, I can use the results of the presentation and have them practice writing down the list of words. Finally, they will discuss the list of words which came to mind and see how many words they all had.

To answer question 2, the ‘why’ question, is the key to any teacher, not just me. Being able to have a plethora of resources to use for the many different learning types that will come into my care. This can be used in a problem solving situation, gaming, and cooperative learning. The problem solving situation and the cooperative learning are constructivism and the gaming is a behaviorism. In the problem solving situation, I will give the students a certain situation in which they would need to solve a certain problem. In the gaming and cooperative learning the students will have to work together and learn from each other as they play a certain game using some sort of visual literacy.

Answering question 3, the integrating into lesson plans question, is the one answer that I think hits the nail on the head. Being able to understand the difference between literacy and visual literacy is something every person can retain in their memory system. As teachers, we all are required to be able to know the different types of teaching aids are available to us. But to be able to take these two aspects and actually put them into action in the classroom is a different matter entirely. When you assign a student to read a certain amount of text they are more than likely to not be able to retain a large percentage of the information. Allowing them to see the information in the form of a picture or video will allow them to remember the information; storing it not only in their short term memory but also in their long term memory as well. This can be used in every aspect of different types of methods. The main methods would be discovery, demonstration, and gaming. Discovery is constructivism. Gaming and demonstration are behaviorism. Discovery is an important aspect of lesson integration. Making your lessons intriguing allows the students to attempt to figure out the answers themselves, leading to discovery.  Demonstration has its advantages in that you as the teacher demonstrate the best way for the students to discover by showing or giving them the tools to make the discoveries themselves. Finally, gaming is another tool used in integrating your lessons of visual literacy with your class is that the visual aspects of different video games or physical games you create will help them to relate the information with the pictures in the game.

This blog post has answered the questions I have asked. I hope that, in a way, this post has brought questions to your own mind.