Twitter, teaching and what is learned

Twitter is a funny animal. Many school districts block its use due to the serious risks that it poses. However, if your district is willing to give it a try, Twitter is really worth using. There are important skills students can learn from using Twitter in the classroom. I got most of these ideas from Matt Levinson's excellent post on ways in which parents can teach kids about the internet.   

1. Digital media is social. Students really need to understand that they are interacting with others every time they get online. It’s also vital for them to deeply believe the phrase “If you don’t want it on the internet, don’t put it on the internet”. That is, everything that goes online, even for an hour or two, will likely stay online for years to come.
2. Appropriate language and sharing apply to the online world. Most students know when and how to speak in public. They don’t reveal personal information and they try not to look foolish by using incorrect english.  The same must apply online.
3. The internet is a PUBLIC space. When you are using Twitter with your students, there are no private notes. The whole world can see what they write including principals, other teachers and yes, perfect strangers. But this is true of the internet as a whole. The sooner students internalize this fact the better.
4. Mistakes are great learning opportunities. Everyone will see when a student makes a mistake. They’ll also see when YOU make a mistake. This is a great opportunity to explain how mistakes lead to better learning.  

Some teachers won’t want to use class time to teach digital citizenship and that’s fine. Even if you really just want the students to learn the course content, there are good reasons to start using Twitter. For one, you’ll increase engagement. Twitter is easy to use and students get almost instant recognition for what they have to say. You’ll also have a chance to use social learning in the classroom. For a great list of ideas on how to use Twitter to teach a variety of topics check out this post.

Once you’ve decided that this platform works well for you and your class, you can start getting a bit more sophisticated with the technology. First, you could add a custom background to your page, personalizing it for your class. You can regularly update it based on the unit you’re studying. If you’d like you can even add unit goals and objectives which often look great to administrators. Don’t forget about your profile, either. With 160 characters, you can provide a solid course description or list some simple classroom rules. Finally, try to get parents involved. Let them know what students are saying (or failing to say) online. Remember that this is a public space and you’re letting students use their public voice. The more you can involve parents in this process, the more your students will get out of it.

Now, those of you out there already using Twitter on a regular basis may want to correct me on some of my claims or ideas. Some of you still think that Twitter (and other social media) is so inherently dangerous that it should be kept out of students hands all together. Please leave a comment.

I, Robot, have a PLN

A PLN is a personal or a professional learning network. Typically, they consist of a group of people who help you learn and grow in whatever it is you do. This covers everything from rock climbing to high school administration. These networks have always consisted of other humans. The internet, though has changed all that in amazing ways. Robots now join in the mix. Please don't start to picture Rosie or C3PO. No, I'm talking about computer programs that are able to bring you important information. Programs have become sophisticated enough to listen to what a room (that is, an online group) full of people are saying and make sense of it. I'd like to introduce three of my favorite robots.

First, there is the hashtag robot. A hashtag is really just the # sign put in front of a word. The convention started with Twitter. People wanted an easy way to search for tweets based on key words. The hashtag became a way for people to mark specific terms as most important. Twitter employs a program that scours all the tweets online, looking for these small symbols and organizes tweets accordingly. So if you write #edtech for example, the hashtag robot will put your tweet in a list with all the other tweets containing  #edtech. That means that you can do a simple search for that term to get thousands useful tweets about (in this case) educational technology. The robot has become a vital part of learning networks for educators.

Zite is a mobile app that works as an electronic magazine. When you first download this free app, it asks you to describe the kinds of articles you'd like to read. You can choose from sports, politics, gossip... whatever you like. Then it does something amazing. It begins to learn from you. You tell the robot back at the Zite company when you like an article and it will bring you more of the same. Tell it when you dislike an article, and it will bring less. What's even better is that on a tablet, it brings up some key terms. You can tell Zite to look for articles in your genre with those key words. For example, I've taught Zite to fetch me articles on Technology which also deal with education, tablets and Google. I get all the educational technology news I want from Zite's robot.

Google Plus is bringing a new robot on the scene. The robot is called Search+ and it works by looking at your Google plus social network to bring you material it thinks you would be most interested in. Since it is only now being rolled out, I haven't had much time to test it out to see what it will bring to me. The implications are huge, though. If this robot is able to make sense of your network on Google plus and truly bring you relavent results, you should be able to find quality resources more easily and in less time. I think this would work best if you were careful to use Google plus just for professional networking. Having your friends in the mix could skew your search results giving you some great gift ideas, but not really showing you want you want for work.

Don't get me wrong- none of these PLN's could function without the people who make them up. I'm just saying that now we're going to have to welcome the newcomers. Now, we're working with robots.

Contributing to digital literacy

Most teachers think about digital literacy on a daily basis even if they don't use those exact words. Instead,  conversations center around the "junk" kids find on the internet. Or maybe they complain about students believing that a human can also be part tree because of what they saw online. The solution is typically to chat with the kids about taking ideas with a grain of salt. We teach critical reading, listening and thinking. As always, we are hard at work teaching our charges to be literate about their world.

There is a part of digital literacy we don't always think about, however. That is, we are often responsible for putting content online. Is the content we add valuable? Is it authoritative? If you are on Twitter, consider the things you post. Every time you link one of your posts to a blog, you increase it's rank in Google search. If you comment on blogs, those comments add context to the original post. Your online footprint adds to what is online.

Since we want our students to be able to evaluate internet material for bias, authority, timeliness and relevance, we have to do more than just talk a good talk. We need to do what we can to add to the quality of the internet. In many ways this is a classic dilemma for every teacher. Our calling is to teach kids how to be upstanding adults. Our actions in public teach students more about how to be grown up than anything we say in class. In the same way, we teach kids to be good digital citizens. We must therefore be careful about what goes into our online footprint.

Effects on student writing

Student writing is taking an interesting turn, don't you think? There are currently far more forms of writing than ever before. It ranges from traditional hand writing to the recent social media phenomenon. These writing mediums are all influencing one another in subtle and not so subtle ways. Lets take a quick look at some of what's going on. Contrary to popular opinion, there is plenty of handwriting going on. For example, it's still taught in primary schools whereas students don't learn to type till much latter. Plus, nearly everyone handwrites their class notes largely because there aren't many alternatives to pen and paper (especially in math class!).

On the other hand, do kids even pass notes in the hallway anymore? I think they only text each other to keep up with the local gossip. Once they get home from school, they start working on homework... right after updating Facebook  and Tweeting a little. They let their friends know how they're doing in 140 characters or less. Texting and posting on social media is an amazing feat of of encapsulation. They take dozens of feelings and events and boil them down to just a few sentences! Imagine how great it would be if students would apply that ability to summarize our last lecture.

Of course, word processors are ubiquitous in education. Whether using Microsoft Word or Google Docs, students nearly always type essays or research papers. And it makes sense. Their teachers really don't want to deal with paper fringes or sloppy penmanship. Plus, there are no spell checkers in a pencil. What student would ever want to turn in a paper without a computer to proof read it for them.

So what are all of these writing forms doing to a student's ability to put thoughts down on a page? One clear effect is on spelling. In the past few years I've seen students inserting "cuz" instead of "because", "pple" instead of people or even "l8r" instead of "later". These text abbreviations are even put into graded essays. The other thing that I've noticed is a decline in complex sentences. Most of my students write in small, easy to read sentences. Since these are the same kids that send short blurbs to others everyday while texting, its little wonder that sentences should shrink. Word processors have actually improved student writing, though. Or at least they can. A word processor can allow students to easily brainstorm, manipulate text and edit on the fly. If they are using an online editor like Google Docs, students can also collaborate on writing and teach each other in real time.

So it's clear that student writing is going to continue to evolve. It also seems clear that much of that change will be driven by the multitude of writing media available today.