Yesterday we held our second TechTalk of the year. TechTalk is a monthly show that focuses on specific digital texts or tools that should be used in your classrooms. We view classrooms as stretching from K through 12, and up into higher education. The show is meant to provide an easy to access overview of a tool, and then have some dialogue about what happens when we use this tool in the classroom. We focus on affordances, opportunities, and challenges of the specific tool.

The second episode of TechTalk focuses on the use of Twitter in teaching and learning. This episode is our second look at a tool (Twitter) that many teachers try to use in their classrooms. The blog post from the first episode is available here.

This episode was primarily motivated by a written piece by some of our students in the IT&DML program. In a paper for one of our classes Cathy Bosco-Walker, Elizabeth Ferry, Sally Markiewicz, and Amy Paskov all thought deeply and responded to Twitter as a tool and possible literacy-based practices involved in the use of Twitter.  For part of their assignment, Cathy, Elizabeth, Sally, and Amy had to review the following materials:

• Look up #twitteracy on Twitter.  Get an idea of who is posting and why.
• Reading from NPR: Can Twitter Boost Literacy? – http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=213500923
• Reading from The Educational Forum:  Twitteracy: Tweeting as a New Literacy Practice – http://www.kdp.org/publications/theeducationalforum/pdf/TEF764_Greenhow_Gleason%20(2).pdf
• Reading from The Teaching Channel: Getting Started with Twitter in the Classroom – https://www.teachingchannel.org/blog/2013/06/20/twitter-in-the-classroom/
• Video: Twitter has Place in Classroom (CNN) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w9CnaeaiAE
• Video: Using Twitter Effectively in the Classroom (Alec Couros) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqSCR3HU4eg

After they reviewed the materials they completed a written reflection on Google Docs. What caught my eye from some of their responses included the following questions. Can you imagine encouraging a “back channel” in your classroom? How would composing tweets of 140 characters or less correlate with sustained reading? Is condensing thoughts into 140 concise characters a good practice in our “sound bite world”? The question that really struck me focused on whether or not you can be a “connected educator” without being on Twitter.

The video for this episode of TechTalk is below. You can view the TitanPad with the show notes here.

 

Image CC by Mashable