Facebook and Twitter in the classroom?

Social media in the classroom is an interesting subject. While I haven’t used it for class instruction, I have used Facebook to communicate with students regarding a Spain trip that I planned. This worked incredibly well for me and gives me hope that my new summer Twitter account will work as well. I plan on using Twitter (still waiting to be approved) as a means of communication in Spanish for my upper level students during the summer. Essentially it would start out as discussions and those wanting to participate could. I think that using social media in the right ways makes complete sense. How cool would it be if my students were reading through Spanish tweets and adding their own thoughts throughout the summer? I highly doubt that they will take the time to watch movies in Spanish or read in Spanish, but if they have regular tweets coming right to their phones the convenience might win out. I think that in order to use social media in the classroom you have to have a strong plan. You shouldn’t go into it without researching exactly what to do, for example- how to make your profile private, how to accept only the followers (aka students) that you want to accept, etc. I think from the viewpoint of the student Twitter and Facebook offers them a convenience that they cannot find with My Big Campus or Moodle. While MBC and Moodle try to be appealing to students, truthfully students don’t spend their free time on them like they do with Facebook and Twitter. Even I am constantly on Facebook. From the administrator viewpoint, I think that teachers should have to communicate exactly how they plan on using the social media tool in the classroom, and they should have to be able to answer the hard questions before being allowed to use said tool. As a high school teacher I don’t deal with students under the age of 13, but I do think that if federal law states that they can not have an account then they shouldn’t have one, plain and simple. As a parent I wouldn’t want my child using social media in the classroom or in general if it was breaking Federal law.

To sum it up I think that these are both great tools for the high school classroom if used correctly and if the work is put in to understand how to use them correctly. If you can’t answer questions like “What will you do to be sure that non-students do not enter into the discussion?” (if your school is concerned with this), then you probably shouldn’t be using them yet.

Week 7 - curation tools

When sifting through the variety of curation tools that my online colleagues reflected on, I came across one that I immediately felt would fit very well into my classroom. Here is the example: Pearltrees example. This link comes from Nikki, and could be used for a lesson on the Paris metro. I particularly like the cleanness of Pearltrees and that much useful information was grouped so nicely together for her students. She included images, videos, basic information, and additional resources that would help her students gain an understanding of what the Paris metro is really like without having been there.

I could do a number of activities with this tool. So many cultural ideas come to mind immediately. Perhaps one of the most helpful uses would be using Pearltrees to introduce a project to my students. I created a more simple collection of useful information for students on tapas that I could put into this format as use as an intro to a tapas themed project combining research and presentational elements. Here is my example: http://pinterest.com/leticiaclen/tapas/. I much prefer the look of the Pearltrees curation tool to that of Pinterest for a classroom setting. In pearltrees I could curate links that would provide students with websites and videos that I chose to help guide them through the project. If my ultimate goal was to have students present and cook a Spanish tapa of their choice, providing basic history to go along with the presentation in Spanish, I could send my students directly to language authentic materials avoiding all the non-authentic or unrelated information that they tend to find. They would have access to the videos that I chose instead of trying to gain an understanding on the theme but not knowing where to look.

I think I will definitely be using a curation tool in the future to help direct my students through projects. This information learned will be very useful in my classroom.

Aimed application - thoughts from week 6

There are several applicable components from this course that I could see myself incorporating into my classroom. First of all, this class has opened my eyes to a number of new tools, and really the idea that I need to stay current with tools. I am going to take the challenge of learning and incorporating at least one new applicable tool into my classroom per semester and repeating this each year. Starting with VoiceThread (truthfully, I am enamored with it) I will seek out ways to connect my students more socially to the language. I think that the tools section of this course really did give me a lot of new, good ideas. As an educator, I need to stay current with technology…I don’t know why I wasn’t really doing this before. I guess I just wasn’t challenging myself in this way. There are so many things that we as teachers need to accomplish on a day-to-day basis that by the end of the year we almost have no room to breathe. I will need to force effort to accomplish this, but I know that I can do it. Really, I just needed to be introduced to these tools.

This week, the focus on authentic assessment has also touched me. I know that I have a very enjoyable course that produces well-prepared students, but I don’t know if I would call all my assessments authentic. As we start our book adoption process, I am going to keep this in mind. The more authentic and real life I can find, the better. Essentially we will be rewriting the curriculum soon, so now is a perfect time to make sure that I structure my assessments and projects to be less traditional overall and more authentic.

Some concepts would be harder for me to incorporate. Mostly, I am hindered by many of the educational tools being blocked at the high school where I teach. Pretty much anything social related is blocked including forums. We do have some ways to use forums but they aren’t as appealing as blogger for example. I also still cannot see myself teaching an online course in a foreign language. The oral communication is such an important component, and I know that perhaps Skype could be utilized for this, but I am still not completely sold. I would be really interested in seeing what universities that teach online language courses do to address this component. I feel like leaving it out would not do the language (or the student) justice. Overall though I do have a lot of good ideas that I can take away from this course and apply to the classroom.