Twitter in the classroom

Teacher who want to engage their students are climbing an uphill battle. Not only is it difficult to maintain student engagement and participation among a 90 minute lessons but even more so, with budget cuts there are even more students being squeezed into classroom. Therefore, conversation and total participation has suffered. However, many teacher are suggesting that the use of Twitter can help to broaden participation and help engage students. Although there are drawbacks depending on the SES of students and whether or not they have cell phones and computers, when integrated into the class setting this usually can be worked around. There are two main benefits to integrating Twitter:

Increased Participation

When experimenting with twitter teachers have found that it has helped to pull in more students that don’t regularly engage in discussions. It creates an interesting class dynamic because you go from having three to four students talking about the discussion material to 25 to 30 people talking about it. This integration can be done through having students tweet comments or questions from a laptop or cell phone while the teacher responds to a real-time feed displayed in the front of the room. Students have claimed that this method of classroom discussion helps students get over shyness and begin to become involved within the discussion.

Creates a Community of Learners

Twitter creates a gateway for students to continue discussion even after leaving the classroom. Creating an environment where students discuss issues outside the classroom is difficult, especially when discussion is cut off when class is over. The beauty of using twitter is that there is not time line or cut off. Many teachers have reported that students in class discussions on twitter have spilled over into their free time discussions ever twitter as well. Using twitter helps students who do not know each other well get a sense of each other outside the classroom space, rather than just people they see a few times a week within the educational setting. They then create stronger bonds in which everyone feels more comfortable sharing their ideas and thoughts. Therefore, people are more respectful of each other and classroom conversations become more productive. 

Thus it appears that Twitter is a great platform to allow conversations within the classroom to flourish. Here is a video that shows a proven methods to engage students through technology, including twitter:

Moodle

I know that some people have already mentioned the idea of moodle and what it does. However, I researched some and found some great videos on YouTube that really help to explain exactly what it is, walk you through the uses, and explain how it is used in the classroom.

Project: Literature Response

The article, “Tech-to-Stretch”: Expanding Possibilities for Literature Response, looks into the way English class intsruction can be enhanced through digital technologies. It introduces a project that preservice teachers engaged in, that I think would be interesting to have students participate in as well. They first researched different elements of visual literacy and then began responding to historical nonfiction literature through digital as well as traditional multimodal forms. They read, interpreted images, posted online wirtten as well as visual responses, created symbolic collages, role played, enacted dramatic tableaux, and engaged in conversation. After this, they all selected from the mutlitude of representational resources they had compiled and then collaboratively created digital movies in order to further explore aspects of the book. The article goes into detail about three of the groups and focuses on the ways the students capatilized on the various opportunities afforded through the modalities. Because these preservice teachers were on the elementary track, the article provides implications for elementary and middle school classroom instruction, however, I think that these ideas can easily be molded and added on to make the assignment appropriate within a high school setting. I also think it is quite possible to have an honors or possibly AP class participate in the actual project the preservice teachers did.

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For further reading of the article:

http://0-www.jstor.org.library.coastal.edu/stable/27639451?seq=1&Search=yes&term=tech-to-stretch&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dtech-to-stretch%26wc%3Don&item=1&ttl=1&returnArticleService=showArticle&resultsServiceName=doBasicResultsFromArticle

3D Virtual Worlds

I have read multiple articles on integrating 3D virtual worlds within the classroom as well as the impacts that they are going to have on the future of education. However, most of these articles simply praise this phenomenon and never really look at the pros as well as the cons of. I came across an article, 3D Virtual Worlds as Environments for Literacy Learning, which does take the time to look at the possibilities as well as the problems. The article, of course, talks about the range of opportunities for children to use digital literacies in school, and offers an example of how we can explore changing literacy practices in a fun, but meaningful way. The purpose of the paper is to identify some of the main issues that came up in designing and implementing virtual world work in a few primary schools in the UK. Although I’m mostly interested in how to integrate technology in a high school setting I still believe this article is beneficial in revealing some issues that aren’t always brought to light. One of the main aspects it brought up was the tensions between different discourses about literacy and literacy learning and then actually shows how these played out by teachers and students in the classroom. The case study provides a wide range of perspectives from classroom observations, chatlogs, in-world avatar interviews with teachers and students, as well as the author’s field notes of the planning process of the program, along with minutes and meeting documents. After looking even at the limitations the author of the article decided that this type of work with 3D virtual worlds definitely questions the ideo of how transformative practice is achieved through technology. However, it suggests that changes in teacher preparation, continuing professional development as well as wider educational reform is going to be needed in order to make it work.

I’m still not sure I’m entirely convinced that this type of literacy learning through a virtual world is the best way to go. I think that it has potential to do great things and I’m not saying it should not be implemented at all. But I am a firm believer that this type of practice should be used as a reinforcer, not as the primary practice. I understand incorporating new technology and doing everything we possibly can to engage students and help reach the overall goals, but I think that attention, and most of it, still needs to be spent in the real world. There are multiple other technologies that can be used out there, I’m just not so sure that I’m buying this virtual world pedagogy yet. But we will see…

Copyright

I found an article that talks about copyrite with technology today. I thought after our discussion in class it would be interesting to look a little further into the aspects of copyright. This article brings up a good point. It talks about how images used to be read-only in the 20th Century, however, with the introduction to products like movie maker and i-movie these images have become read-write images and this has strongly blurred the lines.

The article first talks about copyright basics. Two interesting facts that I didn’t realize about technology copyright are:

1. Copyright laws are subject to ongoing interpretation. Uses deemed legitimate often hang narrowly in the balance. The shift of a single opinion in this instance would have changed the outcome.
2. Congress can change copyright rules at any time and has done so frequently in recent years.

The article then talks about copyright in the classroom. The main point in this is that teachers and students are allowed to use materials without the authors permission as long as it falls under fair use in education. To qualify for this four factors have to be considered which are:

1. purpose of use
2. nature of the work
3. amount used
4. effect on the market

The next section deals with Creative Commons and copyright. This was established to create some sort of common ground in which copyright does not become the “total control of media and materials with all rights reserved, or the anarchy of peer sharing networks with no safeguards for copyrighted materials.” Creative Commons recognizes and protects the rights of the author of material  while still allowing certain uses in education. The example they provide is: ”Magnatune is a music label featured on the CreativCommons site that offers downloadable music tracks. Individual users are asked to purchase downloaded tracks, but the license also permits and encourages educational use without charge. Similarly, the Open Photo site provides images off ered under a Creative Commons Attribution License that states that the photographs may be used by others provided that proper attribution is provided.” (The Creative Commons search engine is another useful tool constructed to facilitate educational uses of content on the Web. Th e Creative Commons search engine helps identify materials such as images, music, and text whose authors permit reuse for noncommercial purposes.)

For further information and a source for further explanation of fair use:

http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/EJ697342.pdf

Internet Safety

While looking up information for my last post i found an interesting article, “A Better Safety Net.” This article also looks into helping make students use of the internet a bit more safe, but looks at it in an entirely new way that I had never thought of before. It brings up the fact that we have for too long looked at internet safety through the idea that students are potential victims in a “hostile media environment” instead of looking at peer-to-peer safety issues in which students are just as liable for hurting oneanother as anyone, or anything, else. The article is broken into sections which go further into explaining this issue.

When the article looks into internet predators, which is the issue that seems to get the most attention, the information is quite surprising. The article reveals that online predation cases almost never involve abduction or assault and are not violent sex crimes. Instead they are “criminal seductions that take advantage of common teenage vulnerabilities.” The most surprising fact is that most sexual solicitations of teens online are by their own peers. It also stated that students are far more likely to suffer as a result of actions by their peers, or their own, than any other person.

Ther article brings up a concept of “one size does not fit all” in which not all students are equally at risk, research has shown that those who experience issues offline are the ones more at risk when online. Therefore, the idea is that the perspectives of librarians, tech educators, couselors, school administrators, mental health professionals,  social workers, and students should all be included at the online-safety confrences in order to get insights from those who are close to the situations and also know how to deal with offline issues that seem to link to the online issues.

So why is this such an issue? Why is it that we have to worry more about keeping our teens safe from each other than the predators we have always been warned about? Well, the article explains that while the internet is not THE problem is does have elements that contribute. These being: persistance and searchability, replicability, scalability, invisible audiences, and blurring of public and private. All of which are included in the overall idea of disinhibition, which occurs when you are unable to see or hear the recipiant of your comments. This causes a reduction in inhibtions, but along with this comes the reduction of empathy and civility also. The articles suggestion for this is stressing the importance of including lessons on “citizenship, ethics, and critical thinking about content that is incoming and outgoing” that are to be given ”throughout grade levels, curriculumn, and school day, ideally using the very social media and technologies so much in use outside of school.”

Therefore, throughout looking into this concept it seems there is a consistent theme with the answer to attempting to help prevent these issues. Because it doesn’t seem that the internet is the issue, it is simply facilitating the issue, one of the best ways in order to attempt to prevent its use for negative activities is to incorporate it into school lessons. Through doing so we can help students see how they should be using their access to technology, while also helping them see the negative aspects and outcomes of the bullying they have obviously become accustomed to.

Link to Article:

http://0-web.ebscohost.com.library.coastal.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=5&hid=12&sid=509fc086-fa4d-4cf8-a446-ccab02177b99%40sessionmgr14

Cyberbullying

I think that this is a major issue with teenagers today… let me rephrase that I KNOW this is a major issue today. I can only imagine it will get worse, but I can’t help but question what there is to do to prevent and stop the continuation of such actions by students. In my curiosity regarding this question, I found an article that might be somewhat helpful in answering it. The article entitled, “Cyberbullying and Sexting: Technology Abuses of the 21st Century,” that talks about the new set of safety concerns for parents and schools regarding the limitless access students have to information and each other for that matter. The fact is that although the schools have found ways to make the internet a bit more safe for students through filtering programs, there is an entirely new set of issues concerning things such as cyberbullying and sexting that are not addressed. The article takes a look at these two issues and even provides some tips for how teachers and parents might prevent cyberbullying. The article also takes the stance that, “Responsible parents and educators have an obligation to understand the potential uses of new technologies and guide young people in their responsible implementation of them.”A statement I will touch on later after I delve a little deeper into the concepts themselves.

 

I’m pretty sure we all have a general idea of what cyber bullying is, however just incase I am wrong the article provides a great definition of cyberbullying as,” being cruel to others by sending or posting harmful material or engaging in other forms of social aggression using the Internet or other digital technologies.” There are several forms which consist of:

• Flaming: Online fights using electronic messages with angry and vulgar language
• Harassment: Repeatedly sending nasty, mean, and insulting messages
• Denigration: “Dissing” someone online. Sending or posting gossip or rumors about a person to damage his/her reputation or friendships
• Impersonation: Pretending to be someone else and sending or posting material to get that person in trouble or danger or to damage that person’s reputation or friendships.
• Outing: Sharing someone’s secrets or embarrassing information or images online.
• Trickery: Talking someone into revealing secrets or embarrassing information or images online.
• Exclusion: intentionally or cruelly excluding someone from an online group
• Cyberstalking: Repeated, intense harassment and denigration that includes threats or creates significant fear.

The point made that really hit home is the idea that now you don’t have to really overpower anyone to bully them, you simply have to log on and “bully away.” The article goes on to give some suggestions for how to prevent situations like these from happening. I’m going to list these suggestions, however, I’m also linking the article so anyone who is interested can see the short explanation of each suggestion.

1. Establish that all rules for interacting with people in real life also apply for interacting online or through cell phones. Convey cyberbullying inflict harm and all forms of bullying are unacceptable
2. Make sure the school has Internet Safety educational programming
3. Educate young people about appropriate Internet-based behaviors
4. Model appropriate technology usage
5. Monitor young people’s activities
6. Use filtering and blocking software
7. Look for warning signs
8. Utilize an “Internet Use Contract” and a “Cell Phone Use Contract”
9. Cultivate and maintain an open, candid line of communication
10. Teach and reinforce positive values
11. Educate yourself and your community

For a more in-depth explanation for each:

http://0-web.ebscohost.com.library.coastal.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=4&hid=12&sid=f84add5d-12e3-4e3f-9699-3f4b43c3c209%40sessionmgr10

 

 

All of this is very interesting and could help at least do one’s best at preventing and stopping this type of behavior but i can’t help but wonder where you draw the line of teacher responsibility. Yes, we are responsible for the safety and behavior when students are in the classroom. Much of this behavior I feel takes place as much out of school as it does in school. I think many parents are too busy to take action in half the ways listed above, and if these actions are taken by teachers it is only helping half the occurences, if not less. I think that there is so much more to worry about academically with students, it is a bit much to ask us to also try to prevent their behaviors outside the classroom as well. However, it is undoubtedly difficult for students to participate and become engaged as much as we would like if their mind is on some other instance linked to this type of behavior. I guess I am just perplexed because I want to help, I want to ensure the safety of my students and instill morals within them. However, I just don’t know if I will have time to do so with everything else that is expected on top of that. I guess I’m just not really sure how I feel about where responsibility truly lies.