Tweeting In The Classroom.
Hi,
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Happy Sunday….well, at least I hope it is.
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Isn’t it amazing how quickly Tweeting has become a solid part of modern everyday life.
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And isn’t it amazing how it has become useful in unexpected ways.
For instance, helping in education.
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Many schools are finding that it is helping their pupils to develop.
In the UK there are now teachers who are helping set up, and encouraging their pupils to get used to, Twitter in the school environment
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These following messages are from a lot of 6 and 7 year olds who tweet from their own classroom, to share what they are currently doing at their UK school.
They are learning to spell by using Phonics and Twitter.
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The tweets are hilarious and wonderful…
…We have been pe and at wereship….
….We have been garding and tayiding up and piking vegbol….
….We have been dowing exited things…
Isn’t that just super!
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In America this has all gone a step further at the University of Texas in Dallas in the Twitter Experiment.
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Dr. Monica Rankin, Professor of History at the School Of Arts and Humanities, had the idea of using Twitter during her lectures to see if it would help develop the process of delivering information.
In all classes there is a problem with the shyer, quieter student, who does not feel confident to speak up and ask questions in front of everyone else.
They do not want to make a mistake or seem stupid.
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There are always, in any class, a few students who ask many questions and will continue to argue their point, but are the shy students actually getting information to help with things they may be unsure about.
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Using the system allows all 90 students to be drawn into class discussions, shy or not.
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They can instantly type in a question in the lecture and it is shown up on the board in front of them immediately and can be commented on and seen the others, who may then want to post up their own comment or contribution.
Anyone who does not have a means to join in at this point can write down their comment and hand it in to an assistant afterwards and then it will be posted straight away too.
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Limiting the comment to the necessary 140 characters also helps the students to focus their minds and not digress into non-essential detail, so the learning process is faster and clearer.
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It also means that if the professor is travelling she can still read the tweets and send in her comment, which lets the students know she is still paying attention to them.
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There is a video here to show the details.
The students seem to really like the whole process….especially the shy ones I should think.
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The Twitter Experiment.
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