I have mentioned this before, but I come from a journalism background. When I started my undergrad my track was "Print Journalism" and that is the track I graduated with, but my junior and (especially) my senior year the curriculum started changing from "print" to "multimedia." So, we adapted and started telling news stories just through the headline, we got our breaking news from Twitter, and our formatting was blog based. When I decided to pursue a career in English Education I wanted to find ways to utilize my journalism and multimedia skills as much as possible, so I started reading a lot about classroom blogs, websites etc.
I recently found this article on the use of Twitter in an English class and I was immediately drawn to the idea! I want to know your thoughts and ideas for using positive social media outlets in the content classroom. Discuss in the comment section. :)
Here is the link to the article for your reference: Bringing Twitter to the Classroom
Here are my thoughts: I think to connect to today's students we have to do more than try to understand them, we have to show them that we want to understand them! I want to teach my students how great it is to love to read, and how to appreciate a good book. I also want them to have excellent writing skills, relevant writing skills, online professionalism, and the confidence to share with their peers intellectually stimulating and positive ideas...not just selfies. I think Twitter/Blogs can be really effective in meeting those goals. I love this teachers use of Twitter and I plan on mimicking his strategy in my future classroom.
One of the activities I've done in the past requires the use of Twitter. In this activity, students assume the role one of the characters in the story (I've found that groups works best to get the ideas flowing).
ReplyDelete1. Students create a Twitter profile using the name of their assigned character and add other characters from the class as friends.
2. Students "vent" from the perspective of their character (could be a positive or negative post, depending on the character and should be based on the events in the text).
3. Other characters comment from their perspective.
I find that this gives students an engaging way to learn characterization and character motives, while also encourages them to read actively.
I've used this activity with Arthur Miller's "The Crucible", Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily", and Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game."
This would be especially useful in a school with a Bring Your Own device program, not as applicable to the school I had my last semester of student teaching that had no lab and had outdated laptops. I think Jameson's idea is great! Here are a few of my ideas for twitter use in ELA (after making sure students are using "protected" accounts of course):
ReplyDelete1) I would also like to give individual students different textual elements to tweet about from personal accounts created with their school-assigned email: tone, symbolism, imagery, point of view, author purpose, audience, historical significance, historical context, etc.
2) I would like to have students search safe websites and tweet a resource/research link that they would use for a research paper. Students could also tweet-in with a safe hashtag to the teacher what their thesis or topic for a paper would be if they were given the direction to choose. I think this makes research/academic writing a more collaborative element as opposed to more of a "you're on your own." Perhaps they have written a research paper before, but it may ease others into it to share and get feedback.
3) A teacher could tweet videos, articles, images etc relating to the reading and students get points for commenting within a given time frame. This way, as the author of the article said, if students are at home refreshing their news feed and see something the teacher posted about what they are learning, have learned, or will learned, it can keep them engaged as opposed to not thinking about it as soon as they leave school grounds.
4) Students can follow accounts like authors, appropriate parody accounts, publishing company, education resources, and get points for retweeting or responding to things that are relative to what they are learning. Anything good that gets shared could be retweeted by the teacher or projected on the Smart Board in class!
5) Students can also create their own haikus in 140 characters. I love short poetry in the form of Tankas and haikus, and other more modern styles for students to learn. I really don't see why this couldn't take the form of writing it down and turning it in, and this way it gets shared if they have confidence in and are proud of their work for a larger audience to see.
All of these ideas are great! The main goal I have with using Twitter is to give students a familiar way to collaborate educationally with their peers. Carley, I think your idea of having students submit their thesis topic via hashtag is very creative! James, I love your idea of character playing through twitter! It really gives the students the opportunity to connect with the characters personality.
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