Brandon,
Great, please come back and share your experience with the group!
Wishing you continued success in the classroom.
Theresa Schmitt
Agreed, these are great examples and I can't wait to integrate this into my teaching strategy.
I experimented with Twitter but it flopped. Incredibly, younger students have moved on and older students complain about too many accounts and tend to traditional email, FB, or commnicate within the institutions established LMS. I keep an open mind and will seize upon any tech that advances communication and learning.
Our school permits the use of Twitter for our instructors and students. I was shocked when I polled the class and saw there was Zero interest in participating in Twitter. However, we do use a class facebook page for interactions between the students, the instructor and the program director. I wonder if it is age related?
At our school, we do not use any social media for instructional purposes. We use a power point presentation followed by live lab work. This is now the current method of instruction utilized by most career institutes which cater to the automotive industry. This is not to say we won't ever use different methods of media instruction in the future, just not as of now.
Depending on your course subject matter, Twitter can also be an excellent way to keep current on news relevant to the course. I don't generally use Twitter to directly give information to my students, but I do encourage students to follow industry leaders and news sites, then discuss those items in class. Students that use Twitter to stay informed provide valuable insights during those discussions.
A great use of twitter would be for creating a virtual office hour forum. You could post to your twitter and receive tweets back from the group. You could reply and post link to additional materials. It is a much more engaging and real time apparatus compared to asynchronous discussion boards.
I think this would be hard for us to monitor and would easily lead to unproductive time with the general maturity level of students.
I agree James, monitoring social media in class would be a huge burden for us in our environment.
Unfortuneately, having never used Twitter myself, dur to the fact that I thought it strictly was for keeping in contact with the Hollywood celebrity scene, I totally avoided any use of this social media site. I would agree with the other teachers, that in my classes of 30+ students it would be diddicult to monitor and respond to multiple feedbacks, reflections, and contributing thoughts on technical issues and questions.
I think this would be hard to manage. Our school has a no cell phone policy.
I am not sure how I would use a class Twitter group. I could be the disseminator of information to the class, but I am not sure if this will become overwhelming.
At our school we are exploring the use of a You-Tube Channel so that instructors can create video lectures for students who miss class.
We currently do not use social media at out institution via our no cell phone policy but we have recently started to allow comments for surveys on cell phones and tablets. I have found in the younger generation that many have a difficult time abiding to a no cell phone policy. It can be quite daunting to manage.
I would use Twitter to engage students. I teach in textiles, so it would be interesting to Tweet apparel needs and appropriate textiles for those needs and encourage students to respond with comments as to why they are appropriate.
Love to have constant communication with my students. This is great!
We disallow social media and for good reason in our current classroom/lab setting. I also can see how it would be extremely hard to manage within our large, immature classrooms.
Keegan, I think your ideas for incorporating Twitter are spot on. I think that Twitter could be used as a supplement to the classroom, not something that is utlizied during class. If you have younger students that are already using this form of social media, it would be easy to get into their feed and begin discussions about class subjects. While some people beleive that their students are too young or immature to handle this sort of interaction, I think this is more the time to educate them on how to behave in this outlet. After all, hospitality businesses are using this as a form of communication and it would be relevant to my student's future career.
I have to agree with all the instructors for our institute. We would have a very difficult time monitoring language and profanity, not to mention in our industry. Business owners do not what technicians or their phones for liability and productivity reasons. I do believe that is changing because of newer technology and use of computers for diagnostic tool.
We are not allowed to use much in the way of current technology for classroom use. This is unfortunate for the learners that are experienced technological users. Incorporating more technology for the educator would help us not to become complacent.
