Thinking About Learning

I recently had a conversation with my district Director of Technology, a TIS friend, and my former Global Horizons teacher partner about the merits of Twitter and the possibilities for the educational use of Twitter.  Here are some of the links that have helped shape my perspective:

9 Reasons to Twitter in Schools (Tech & Learning)

Tech Crunch: Impact of Twitter on the world

Times article: Great Britain considers Twitter for the  primary curriculum

Twitter as a District Communication Tool: School district in New Zealand uses Twitter to disseminate information to parents, students, and staff (Chris Dawson)

Teaching with Twitter: 10 great instructional ideas for the classroom from Steve Wheeler

Best Practices in a Twitter-enhanced High School Classroom: Practical explanation of how to manage Twitter use in a classroom along with ideas for using Twitter as an instructional tool from Teaching Paperless.

Can We Use Twitter for Educational Activites?: Presentation by Gabriella Grosseck and Carmen Holotescu

A Twitter Code of Conduct: An article from BusinessWeek about Twitter’s impact on the business world

My own 2 blog posts about Twitter:

Changing the World, Can Twitter Change Education?

Twittering Teachers and PLN

Here’s a link to all of my DIIgo bookmarks about Twitter.  The list includes Twitter apps, news articles about Twitter, lists of Twittering teachers, and Twitter in education.  This doesn’t even scratch the surface!

As digital educators, we’re always looking for new ways to engage our students through technology-enhanced learning opportunities.   At this point, Twitter is blocked in my district, so I’m always on the lookout for other options for student collaboration and “realtime” conversations.  On Twitter today, Chris Webb did some “thinking out loud” and wondered about using a backchannel for student interactions while they watched a video.  He had previously blogged about how a teacher in his school, Pat Gerding, had used Today’s Meet as a backchannel during class.  This looks like a great way to engage students in conversation about learning in a somewhat private format.  All you do is go to the Today’s Meet website and create a room.  No account is necessary.  Once you create the room, you share the url with your students so they can enter it.  Can’t wait to try it out!

It’s amazing how something so simple as a 140 character reply to the question, “What are you doing?” could have such a huge global impact on society. Tech Crunch reports,

Worldwide visitors to Twitter.com increased 95 percent in the month of March from 9.8 million to 19.1 million.

Businesses use Twitter as a source for free advertising.  Politicians use Twitter for campaigning.  Celebrities use Twitter to increase their celebrity status. (Can anyone explain why Oprah felt a need for this?)  Twitter is having such an impact on the corporate world that according to  BusinessWeek,  some companies are developing social media codes of conduct for employees:

To prevent sensitive information leaks, blemishes on a reputation, and other potential liabilities of a Twittering workforce, companies are drafting new employee codes of conduct and educating workers about what they should and shouldn’t say on the site. The basic rule: Don’t be stupid.

Why is Twitter taking the world by storm?  Clive Thompson sums it up:

Individually, most Twitter messages are stupefyingly trivial. But the true value of Twitter … is cumulative. The power is in the surprising effects that come from receiving thousands of pings from your posse. And this, as it turns out, suggests where the Web is heading.

So why has Twitter been so misunderstood? Because it’s experiential. Scrolling through random Twitter messages can’t explain the appeal. You have to do it — and, more important, do it with friends… It’s practically collectivist — you’re creating a shared understanding larger than yourself.

I love the phrase, “creating a shared understanding larger than yourself.” I have been Twittering for about a year and a half, and I only follow educators.  My primary purpose is personal professional learning.  Twitter is my best source for professional development.  I’ve been slow and selective about choosing people to follow, but I have developed a wonderful network of like-minded professionals around the world.  As I interact with these people in ongoing short phrases, we have a shared understanding of what it means to be passionate about the role of technology in education.  We share great ideas, our successes, our frustrations, and things we’ve learned in the midst of the sprinkled tidbits of our personal lives.  Teacher collaboration has been identified as a key factor in raising student achievement, and through social networking tools like Twitter, I can collaborate and learn from the best around the world.

So my question is this: since Twitter is such a powerful learning tool, how do we go about harnessing that collective learning energy for use in schools? Great Britain is considering recommendations for updating the primary curriculum,  suggesting that children should be familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter by the time they go to secondary school.  They may consider dropping traditional content in favor of emphasizing informational technology, according to the Times.  Although my district is very proactive in the area of providing technology equipment for schools, it still has a very conservative stance on blocking many useful social networking tools like Twitter that enhance learning.

Imagine a classroom where differentiated instruction results in students using MP3 players, cell phones, laptops, and gaming devices to pursue individual learning goals.  They interact with students around the world via Twitter, Ning, or other social networking vehicles to ask questions, collaborate, share resources, and share learning in real time.  Immediate response, immediate feedback, immediate dialogue about learning.  Twitter is changing the way the world communicates.  Why should our students be the last to benefit?

Last week someone shared a link to Myebook on Twitter.  This is a cool, free application that allows you to create a digital flash book with pages that “turn.”  There are 2 ways to create: upload from a PDF (fast & easy) or create from scratch (which allows you to customize your pages with color, backgrounds, frames, templates, etc).  I decided to create one from scratch to get a feel for how it worked.

Then I tested the PDF option with a student project:

There are so many ways this could be used in school, not only for Language Arts, but in every content area.  Primary teachers could use it to create class books, and older students could create individual books.  Teachers could create an end of the year memory book for their class.  Content can be uploaded from your computer, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Bebo, Photobucket, and more.  Books can be designated as public or private.  Each book has its own URL, and embeddable code is also provided.

Recommendations:

• Make sure you have Flash 10 loaded.
• Don’t allow students to go to the Myebook main page.  People post a variety of books, and some content is definitely not suitable for students.  I plan to share and manage by using the URL links.
• For most elementary students, the easiest option would be to have them create their content in Word or PowerPoint and save as a PDF.  Then you upload the PDF, and the ebook is quickly created.  Older students would enjoy creating their own and customizing.

I’ve been working with a fifth grade class to create an online interactive “Choose Your Own Adventure” story.  I first tried this several years ago using Tony Vincent’s templates from his Learning in Hand site.  The first time, I had students from 2 different classes working in pairs to write the story on a wiki.  That ended up being a lot of stories to manage!

This year I tried something a little simpler.  I met with a class several times and we brainstormed/planned the story using Open Mind 2, a mind-mapping program.  OM 2 lets you attach text or other things to its branches.  Attachments are indicated by the paperclips at the end of some branches.  We wrote the text for the beginning of the story together as a group and planned an outline of how the story would progress.

Then students worked in pairs to write the story parts for the remaining branches.  Each pair then created a PowerPoint slide of their part of the story, and I hyperlinked them together.  The plan was to save the PPT as a single web page, but when I did this, it created an mht file, which will only work in Internet Explorer.  Then I used iSpring to convert the PPT to html, and this seems to work.

During the project, I received an email from Ms. Hughes that said, “I am so excited!  Most of my groups in my homeroom have finished their first drafts and have started revising.  They are doing such an awesome job of writing, working together, and having great discussions about their writing.   I am really impressed with them … it has been a great learning activity.”  Six state ELA standards were addressed during this project.

Here’s the story:
The Mystery of the Old, Abandoned House (When reading, click on the refresh button to return to the beginning of the story.)