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Using Twitter in the classroom
At the recent AHISA Pastoral Care conference, Dr Megan Poore encouraged teachers to engage with social networking tools and model best use of them for students. This was framed as a critical PD, pastoral activity, as many students are finding themselves in problematic situations when mismanaging their online identity.
I set up a twitter account for my Year 8 Geography class as a result, with the initial motivation of modelling how to set up such an account, what information to share about yourself and how to set your message across to people online. What has resulted so far has been phenomenal for this group of girls and my teaching alike.
The first indicator of success of this project was when a group called @geocollective started to ‘follow’ us. This was a result of the bio that the girls had constructed together that got the attention of this group. The Geography Collective, based in London is a group of geography activists, teachers, academics and artists. I have utilised their ‘Guerrilla Geography’ concept in Year 11 geography, and so was aware of their work (and legitimacy in communicating with students.)
After making further contact with Daniel Raven-Ellison, a geography activist, urban adventurer and teacher working for Relief International. Daniel has worked as a geography activist forming the ‘Give Geography its Place’ campaign among others. Daniel agreed to a live twitter chat with the Year 8 girls on Friday 30th April. Using the current initiative of the Geography Collective; Mission Explore, Daniel presented the girls with a range of challenges via live twitter. This in itself is a skill, as there are only 160 characters per tweet to get your directives and message across. Students quickly learn to communicate succinctly.
The missions included using one sense at a time to get in touch with your surroundings, as well as the larger mission that will continue in class of mapping ‘unfriendly’ places in the school and area, the resulting product could be used to inform duties such as yard supervision, or even pending building/facilities needs.
While in general the twitter chat worked well, a debrief with Daniel has suggested that we look at setting a task for students to be working on, while the smaller missions and chat questions are coming through. There was a bit of down time for students, and some, while still actively participating in the lesson, could have used a smaller project, such as a cross word, or mapping task, to complete while the tweet was happening concurrently.
Students themselves proposed a range of ways that the tweet chat could be enhanced, including:
· Setting missions back to GeoCollective
· Getting other local schools involved in the tweet, as well as joining ideas and findings of missions
· Having a copy of Mission Explore (will order via Amazon)
· Watching some You Tube clips to get an idea of the GeoCollective
· Setting and completing our own missions and share our findings with others in the schools.
· Collaborating with other classes or Primary School
I will be setting up occasional live twitter chats again with Daniel, and he is also looking further afield for other contacts, such as the Arctic Scientist group. It would be amazing to have girls chat with geographers in the field that relate to what they are doing in class.
I see huge potential for Twitter, not only in connecting students with experts in subject fields, but also in helping students to understand identity and disclosure, and importantly to help them become more metacognitive. Spending five minutes at the end of a lesson to collaborate on a tweet, summarising the core aims or findings of that lesson is a valuable reflective process, both as a class tool, and with your individual account, twitter is an amazing tool to use for this purpose.
Using Twitter in the classroom
At the recent AHISA Pastoral Care conference, Dr Megan Poore encouraged teachers to engage with social networking tools and model best use of them for students. This was framed as a critical PD, pastoral activity, as many students are finding themselves in problematic situations when mismanaging their online identity.
I set up a twitter account for my Year 8 Geography class as a result, with the initial motivation of modelling how to set up such an account, what information to share about yourself and how to set your message across to people online. What has resulted so far has been phenomenal for this group of girls and my teaching alike.
The first indicator of success of this project was when a group called @geocollective started to ‘follow’ us. This was a result of the bio that the girls had constructed together that got the attention of this group. The Geography Collective, based in London is a group of geography activists, teachers, academics and artists. I have utilised their ‘Guerrilla Geography’ concept in Year 11 geography, and so was aware of their work (and legitimacy in communicating with students.)
After making further contact with Daniel Raven-Ellison, a geography activist, urban adventurer and teacher working for Relief International. Daniel has worked as a geography activist forming the ‘Give Geography its Place’ campaign among others. Daniel agreed to a live twitter chat with the Year 8 girls on Friday 30th April. Using the current initiative of the Geography Collective; Mission Explore, Daniel presented the girls with a range of challenges via live twitter. This in itself is a skill, as there are only 160 characters per tweet to get your directives and message across. Students quickly learn to communicate succinctly.
The missions included using one sense at a time to get in touch with your surroundings, as well as the larger mission that will continue in class of mapping ‘unfriendly’ places in the school and area, the resulting product could be used to inform duties such as yard supervision, or even pending building/facilities needs.
While in general the twitter chat worked well, a debrief with Daniel has suggested that we look at setting a task for students to be working on, while the smaller missions and chat questions are coming through. There was a bit of down time for students, and some, while still actively participating in the lesson, could have used a smaller project, such as a cross word, or mapping task, to complete while the tweet was happening concurrently.
Students themselves proposed a range of ways that the tweet chat could be enhanced, including:
· Setting missions back to GeoCollective
· Getting other local schools involved in the tweet, as well as joining ideas and findings of missions
· Having a copy of Mission Explore (will order via Amazon)
· Watching some You Tube clips to get an idea of the GeoCollective
· Setting and completing our own missions and share our findings with others in the schools.
· Collaborating with other classes or Primary School
I will be setting up occasional live twitter chats again with Daniel, and he is also looking further afield for other contacts, such as the Arctic Scientist group. It would be amazing to have girls chat with geographers in the field that relate to what they are doing in class.
I see huge potential for Twitter, not only in connecting students with experts in subject fields, but also in helping students to understand identity and disclosure, and importantly to help them become more metacognitive. Spending five minutes at the end of a lesson to collaborate on a tweet, summarising the core aims or findings of that lesson is a valuable reflective process, both as a class tool, and with your individual account, twitter is an amazing tool to use for this purpose.
