Mod 6, Post 2 - Using Twitter for Professional Development

"Professional Development" is a pretty big buzz word in the world of education. I have been hearing it since declaring an education major in my freshman year of undergrad and I have been continuing to hear it throughout my masters and throughout my first year working in a school. Teachers are called upon to constantly update their professional development by attending workshops, conferences, classes, etc. With all of the technology at our fingertips however, professional development can actually be done right from our phones.


Over the last year or so, I have started to come across educational twitter accounts run by teachers or by education outlets, if you will. I have always enjoyed following them and picking up helpful teaching hints here and there. During one of my student teaching placements I needed to teach a lesson on the difference between revolution and rotation and I actually came across a post on one of the teacher twitters that I followed at the time that gave me a great idea for my lesson!

I have been using Twitter for several years now and I have seen Twitter chats and looked through them, but I never actually participated. I read the article, What is a Twitter Chat?, and it gave me a bit of a deeper insight into what they are. I also read The Twitteraholics Ultimate Guide to help give me better insight into what I was reading in the Twitter Chats.

I think that following eduTwitters and looking through Twitter Chats can be very beneficial for me as a future teacher in terms of finding helpful hints and new strategies, etc. However, I don't necessarily see myself participating in Twitter Chats as a form of professional development - I just think they are nice to look at and browse through for my own personal type of professional development.

I know that some teachers use Twitter as a teaching resource with their kids, as well. I have always thought about when I finally have my own class that I will make a twitter account for the class so that we can post updates and pictures for the parents to follow, which I think would be a very neat idea. Considering that I plan to teach younger students however, I don't think my use of Twitter in the classroom will go much further beyond that.

The more technology you can use and the more outlets for professional development that you can take advantage only means a greater chance of growth for you as a teacher!

Gaming

I tried out the game, Word Bubbles. I played the game probably about 20 times, switching between the four different levels - toddler, kid, big kid, and grown up. 

This game involved users looking at a picture with floating letters around it. If the picture were of a cat, the letters C A T would be floating around separately. The user would have to click on the letters in the right order to spell the word correctly from left to right. 

When using this game in the classroom, the teacher would play a passive role, just going around the supervise and observe the students. This game could be a choice option during iPad time, or it could be used during a specific language block, such as spelling. The student would be active participants, as they would be playing individually with the iPad or on the computer. 

I definitely think that a walkthrough would be necessary for the game, especially for ELL's. A simple demonstration on the SmartBoard to model for the students how to play would work.

Performance indicators and objectives:

STANDARD 4: Students will listen, speak, read, and write in English for classroom and social interaction.
8. Negotiate and manage interactions to accomplish social and classroom tasks. (L, S)

Given a picture and the correct letters, students will be able to identify a picture and unscramble the letters to correctly spell the word that matches the picture.

By walking around the room to observe while students were playing, I would be able to track their progress and see how well they are doing. Players are not allowed to move on in the game if they can not correctly identify and spell the word. By seeing how many new words the student moved on to, I would be able to assess the performance indicators and objectives. 

Gamification in Education

Gamification is the use of game design and game mechanics to benefit areas in a non-gaming context. According to the blog, Tophat,
"We’ve seen this approach in a variety of settings: completing our Subway punch card to win a free sandwich, receiving a badge on Foursquare for being the first of friends to check in at a particular restaurant, or expanding our profiles on LinkedIn to bring the “completion bar” up to 100%. Gamification has even worked its way into the automotive industry with the innovative dashboard of the Ford Fusion hybrid. A high-resolution display features a rendering of vine-like leaves. Waste gas, and your vines wither. Conserve, and they blossom."

Along with Subway punchcards and the dashboards of our Fords, gamification has also worked its way into our classrooms. Educators are gamifying their rooms in very simple ways, but they are beginning to see big rewards. The Tophat article gave me a lot of ideas about gamification, a word that I had never even heard of prior to this mod. However, even though I had never heard of gamification before, I realized that it is something I have integrated into my own teaching without even noticing. Tophat suggests 4 ways to introduce gaming into the classroom: gamify grading, award students with badges, integrate educational video games into your curriculum, and stir up a little competition, such as tournament module platform in the classroom. 

I think that these are all great ideas. I have used point systems before in my classroom, which worked as a great motivator for my students. I did not even think about how the point system linked to games, which is probably why it worked so well with my students!

Gamification in the classroom is a great tool to motivate students and to reach those students who sometimes just need a new perspective on school work - if the student scoffs at assignments, turn the assignment into a game without him knowing and maybe you might see some results. 

Gamification is not the end all, be all, however. Gamification should not be the only motivator in the classroom, as it may take away from some intrinsic motivation. Tophat concludes their post with the quote, "Games can’t be used to replace pedagogy, but can be used to enhance the overall learning experience." I agree with this closing statement 100%. Games are a great tool for the classroom, as well as outside the classroom, to motivate and engage students. However, gaming in the classroom should have a specific time and place. 

Articles read for this post :

http://blog.tophat.com/4-ways-to-gamify-learning-in-your-classroom/

https://www.actfl.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/TLE_pdf/TLE_Oct13_Article.pdf

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/gamification-in-education-vicki-davis

Video Reactions

Educational Change Challenge  

The Educational Change Challenge video was short, but made a lot of great points about staying up to date and relevant in teaching. "Every student can learn, just not on the same day, or the same way" (George Evans) This quote at the beginning of the video was very thought provoking to me. As a teacher with a background in special education, I am very aware of the different learning styles and types of learners that teachers can encounter. However, thinking from an ESL standpoint, I am thinking about even great complexities and differences amongst ESL learners that I will encounter who bring with them even more unique learning styles from their own background and culture that may be very different from what I am used to. 

This quote also struck a chord with me - "In education, the use it or lose it rule may be that if you don't use technology for learning, you may lose relevance; an educator must be relevant. Teachers need to exist in the space the students exist, understand their culture, you have no credibility if you're not where they are. Because the generation of students that I am teaching is at instant putting the drive thru, microwave, downloaded from the internet, media driven generation, I know that I must be innovative to keep their interest and to inspire in them creative curiosity" (Martin). I have grown up with technology and have learned to use it pretty well, but I will admit that during my student teaching, I was having students help me with the SmartBoard technology as well as with some work on the iPad. I needed to include technology into my lessons because that was what the students knew. As a student in elementary school, my teachers used very little technology, so that was why it was hard for me at first to integrate it into my own teaching. However, as this video states, we as teachers must get on the same playing field as our students, and utilize the technology that they all have right at their fingertips. Not using technology in our lessons and daily teaching will simply make us irrelevant in the world's of our students. Not only with technology, but with all aspects of our teaching. We must find a way to get our students to buy into what we are teaching them; we must find ways to keep them engaged. I chose this image from Dead Poets Society because John Keating (Robin Williams) finds ways throughout the movie to connect with his students and keep them hanging on his every word. I find this moving inspiring to me as a future teacher, and it's also just a very great film!

Social Media Revolution 2011

The Social Media Revolution video was again a short clip, but it held a very powerful message. Social is so big, that our world is getting "smaller". We can communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world, in a matter of seconds. A teacher in America can FaceTime with students in China to teach a lesson. Entire college courses, just as this one, can be taught online, with out any physical interaction between professor and students. It is amazing what social media and technology can do, but it is also a bit scary how important it is becoming to society. 

As a teacher, it almost impossible to run a classroom with out being relevant on social media. Even if you're a kindergarten teacher, and your students don't use social media, their parents definitely do, and sometimes that is the only way parents can communicate with teachers. It is to the utmost advantage of us teachers to become comfortable with using social media as a tool in our classrooms, because it is not going anywhere anytime soon. The one quote from this video that I really liked was, "We don't have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it" (Erik Qualman). 

A girl that I student taught with was teaching third grade, and did a whole character study on a book the class read using Facebook as the inspiration behind the project - the students each had to choose a character from the book and create a Facebook page for their character, and then they each had to post on other characters' walls from the point of view of their character. It sounds complicated, but the third graders did an amazing job, because the material was presented to them on a platform that they were familiar and comfortable with - social media. 

As our world grows smaller and our students become more diverse, we as teachers can use technology and social media as a beneficial classroom resource that can help us and our students connect not only with each other, but with other resources around the world that can give them new insights, information, and strategies. 

The picture that I chose for this video is pretty self-explanatory. Most of the tools that were once used in a classroom, even something as simple as a pencil, are becoming obsolete. The majority of learning and teaching are beginning to come in the form of a screen that is attached to the rest of our world.